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COEfREGHT DEPOSIT. 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



REV. HENRY S. WHITEHEAD 



THE GARDEN OF 
THE LORD 



By 

THE REV. HENRY S. WHITEHEAD, M. A. 




Publishers DORRANCE Philadelphia 



Copyright 1922 
Dorrance a Company Inc 



g)CLA639531 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 

APR 10 '22 



TO 

GEORGE PEABODY GARDNER, ESQ. 



INTRODUCTION 



Five of the following Chapters (Chs. V, 
VIII, IX, X, and XI) have been published as 
separate articles in The American Church 
Monthly. To the publisher of that periodical, 
Mr. Edwin S. Gorham, the author gratefully 
acknowledges permission to reproduce them 
here. 

This book is not addressed primarily to the 
clergy, but rather to that large public which, 
at least in the Anglican Communion, vigorously 
asserts its interest in the Church, and in her 
clergy and lay workers. It is neither a theolog- 
ical treatise nor a handbook on parochial ef- 
fectiveness, although it necessarily treats of 
theological matters and is concerned chiefly 
with parochial affairs, and methods of Church 
work. 

It attempts to bring together and present as 
a cognate whole the various facts, conditions, " 
and objects of criticism which are listed near 
the end of Chapter I. It is intended to be 
wholly practical, and to deal primarily with 
matters not commonly touched upon even by 
writers of handbooks. If it shall serve to stim- 
ulate in the direction of the reforms which are 
indicated, it will have succeeded in its purpose ; 
and it is offered to its readers in the single hope 
that in however inconsiderable a fashion, it may 
contribute to the furtherance of clear thought 
about problems connected with God's Holy 
Catholic Church. 

Henry S. Whitehead 

CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, BOSTON, 
LENT, 1922. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



L Cultivating the Loed \s Garden ... 13 

II. A Neglected Source of Information 28 

III. On "Efficiency" 40 

IV. Knowing One's Sheep 50 

V. On Church-Going 63 

VI. The Question of Clerical Marriage 77 

VII. Ceremonial in the Anglican Re- 
vival 93 

VIII. Work Among Foreigners 108 

IX. The Implications of an Ancient 

Rhyme 118 

X. The Cheer-Up Philosophy 128 

XI. God, the Clergy, and Some Modern 

Writers 137 

XII. A Task for Seminarians 148 

XIII. Sample Christians 160 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



i 

Cultivating the Lobd's Gabdbn 

One of the fables which was rarely left 
out of old-fashioned children's "Headers" 
told of a king who summoned his sages 
into his presence, and, selecting two of the wis- 
est, sent out the first to make a tour of his 
kingdom, to take note of all the flowers he might 
see, and report at the end of the year. The 
second was commissioned to report on all the 
weeds and noxious vegetable growths at the 
same time as his fellow. When the king re- 
ceived the two sages at the end of the year, 
he asked the first if he had observed anything 
of interest besides flowers which he might wish 
to include in his report. "Sire," replied the 
sage, "so occupied was I in carrying out thy 
behest that after the first few days I saw noth- 
ing but flowers. Verily this is a right glorious 
kingdom, for there is no valley that is not 
carpeted with flowers, no mountain-side which 
does not glow in the rays of the declining sun, 
as they reflect innumerable glories of rich color 
from the masses of flowering shrubs." 

A similar question was put to the other sage. 
"Sire," replied he, sadly, "it is with me even 

13 



14 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



as with my brother, save that I marvel greatly 
at his report. For truly I saw none of the 
glories he describes! Throughout this whole 
land there is naught but a great curse of weeds, 
which the high gods have sent upon us, doubt- 
less for our sins. Through the length and 
breadth of the kingdom nothing did I see but 
poisonous and ugly weeds, choking the good 
soil and making wretched the lives of the hus- 
bandmen. ' ' 

Now it is sufficiently obvious that both these 
views, widely held about the Lord's garden, 
the Church, are wrong. The modern mind 
sees little in the fable beyond the lesson which 
the king learned — that preoccupation often lies 
at the root of unconsciously warped opinions. 
In a real garden there are always both weeds 
and flowers and homely vegetables, as well as 
certain negative growths, like grass. The cul- 
tivation of a garden, as a constructive art, can- 
not be carried on effectively without the cor- 
respondingly destructive process of rooting 
out the weeds. In the perfect gardener there 
must be an ideal combination of the construc- 
tive — planting — faculty, with the destructive — 
the weed-uprooting — faculty. The more the 
gardener desires to produce, however enam- 
oured he may be of the constructive side of his 
art, the more must he devote himself to the 
destruction of weeds and noxious growths. 
This part of the work is the distressful part. 
It is not "inspiring" to dig out weeds, nor is 
it an easy or congenial task, especially for one 
who looks ahead towards the greater and finer 
results of the task as a whole. But it must be 



CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 15 



done or the garden will not flourish and the 
successive crops will be less and less useful and 
lovely. 

To anyone who pauses to look about him in 
the Garden of the Lord, in the intervals of his 
deputized gardening, the weeds must always be 
an object of interest. There they are with 
their ugly heads showing, their harsh stems 
bristling to choke out the good plants, their 
deep, quick-spreading roots sucking out the 
nourishment from the ground all about, and 
getting tangled with the roots of the good 
plants. It is a nasty job to root them out, a 
back-breaking job, sometimes; but out they 
must come, for the good of the garden. 

Perhaps as good a way as any to get abruptly 
to the task is to remember that a question like 
this is often posed in a public way: "Do you 
want to make Anglicans out of the whole- 
world?" This question is apt to be put in one 
form or another every so often. There are two 
points about it worth noting. First, that from 
its nature, it is the typical question put by one 
who does not dislike weeds, who thinks that 
weeds should be allowed to grow and even to 
be fostered (or, at the very least, let alone), 
and that such effort as might be stimulated by 
the presence of weeds should be directed to 
understanding the uses to which weeds may be 
put. Secondly, this question invariably stuns 
its hearers into a reflective silence from which, 
reluctantly, it may be, emerges the hesitating 
answer, "No, of course not." The answerers 
subside into a sad apathy, which affords oppor- 



16 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD 



tunity to the questioner to rise in his place and 
propound his ism or his panacea unhindered. 

Analysis of the reason why hearers are 
always stunned into acquiescence reveals some- 
thing like this: The question automatically 
drives out of mind the ideal Anglicanism which 
is in the hearts of our mother Church's loyal 
sons and daughters, and there arises in the 
place of that noble mental monument a pur- 
view of Anglicanism as it appears when seen 
piecemeal in its harrowing details. Visions 
rise before the mind's eye of parish rows, duf- 
ferism and ineptitude, "parochialism," groups 
of gossiping old women of both sexes, mean- 
ness, lay popes, struggling parsons with strug- 
gling gentlewomen for wives and groups of 
precariously educated and nourished children, 
sung mattins, local ministerial associations, and 
the bitter cry, "how long, Lord, how long!" 
All these, and countless similar details of 
Anglicanism as it appears on the surface to be, 
arise, we see, before the mind's eye of the 
hearer of the question, and then, inescapeably, 
the reluctant answer rises to tired minds and 
comes out of wearied lips, "No, no, of course 
not that." The ingrained human sense of the 
grotesque comes along to help out the reluc- 
tant conclusion. The imagination deals frag- 
mentarily with things like Hottentots or bol- 
shevists converted to something like the sum 
of the details which have passed through the 
mind. One imagines Esquimaux engaged in a 
cake sale to buy a new carpet for the church. 
Latins stand up in Jerry-built wooden barns 
of meeting houses while a group of caballeros 



CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 17 



and senoritas render Caleb Simper's Te Deum 
in E-flat at Morning Prayer, somewhere in Ar- 
gentina. The mental processes reach after and 
attempt to visualize a large group of Greek 
peasants engaged in stultifying themselves at 
a Pleasant Sunday Afternoon conducted by 
Captain Papadopoulos of the Peloponnesus 
Division of the Church Army. The imagina- 
tion fails, breaks — "No, no, a thousand times, 
no. 9 9 Of course, it is absurd to try to convert 
the world to Anglicanism — abysmal, funny! 

But, approached from another viewpoint, 
this proposal appears less and less absurd. It 
begins in fact to grow upon one when one puts 
the question like this: What expression of 
Christianity is better than Anglicanism? If 
we believe it to be right that there should be 
one fold, as there is one Shepherd, just what 
fold must it be, or is there to be a new Church? 
The "new church" idea is impossible, of 
course, "that way" — as Nineteenth Century 
Novelists were so fond of saying — "that way, 
madness lies !" If there is to be one fold, quite 
clearly it will have to be a fold, however ex- 
panded and rebuilt, which is already on its 
foundations, and the task of determining 
which fold is the less difficult as one applies 
reason and common sense to the problem. 

It is clear enough that there are not so very 
many existing folds to choose from. Sectarian- 
ism has them a-plenty, of course, but the choos- 
ing of any one of these and holding it up, as a 
prospective fold for the world, is ipso facto a 
reductio ad absurdum. One has only to imagine 
the world — it is a large order — Anglican, 



18 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



Roman, "Orthodox," Protestant, and non- 
Christian, all joining the Baptists or the ' 6 Dis- 
ciples" or the "Wee Frees" to get a kaleido- 
scope picture so madly eccentric as to paralyze 
the faculties of reason. 

It must be obvious enough that no one 
variety of Protestantism is adequate for a uni- 
versal fold for mankind. It cannot be that the 
Shepherd desires to gather all His sheep into 
such as this. There remain four possible folds: 
1. The Pan-Protestant fold; 2. the Roman Cath- 
olic fold; 3. The "Orthodox" fold; 4. the Ang- 
lican fold. Among these the pragmatist in the 
subject of Christian Unity must, perforce, 
choose. 

Let us take them up in order and examine 
them, as pointedly and briefly as possible. 

1. The Pan-Protestant plan may almost be 
dismissed off hand, because there is no such 
fold in existence. It is, at best, a chimera. It 
is the name of a hope, and a hope not even 
necessarily connected with world-folding. At 
its very best it is only a panacea on paper with 
a universe of discourse confined to certain 
Christians cut off from historic Christianity 
and desiring no more than to attain a workable 
uniformity of administration among themselves 
despite internecine differences, which have 
proved, up to the present, insuperable. We 
may dismiss that first possibility from any 
present discussion. 

2. Roman Catholicism has very much to com- 
mend it at first sight. It has great numbers 
of adherents ; it is the largest of the Christian 
communions; it has an admirable executive 



CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 19 



system ; it possesses a high degree of efficiency 
among its administrators from highest to low- 
est; it is committed to an intensely definite 
system of theology and administration; its ad- 
herents are well taught in the tenets of their 
faith and are, in general, and with certain not- 
able national and racial exceptions, entirely 
loyal to their system. On the other hand, in 
spite of all these enormous advantages, the 
Roman Catholic system does not commend 
itself to Christians of other varieties of the 
faith because of certain broad, general facts, 
which are as follows : 

It has patently added certain definite doc- 
trines to the faith, a thing unparalleled else- 
where in Christendom, which the rest of Chris- 
tendom, in the nature of things, cannot accept. 
The chief of these additions is the phenomenon 
known as the Papal Claims, whereby the Bishop - 
of Rome claims to be the Vicegerent of God on 
earth, both with respect to spiritual and tem- 
poral affairs, and to be infallible when pro- 
nouncing, officially, on questions of faith or 
morals. 

The Roman Catholic system, viewed as a 
whole, does not conform to the test of Holy 
Scripture, even when reverent and due allow- 
ance is sympathetically made for the normal 
development which Christ promised under the 
guidance of the Holy Spirit of God. Herein 
again there is absolute consensus of opinion 
among the spiritual and intellectual leaders as 
well as among the rank and file of the rest of 
Christendom. 

The general position of the Roman Catholic 



20 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



Church is one which history, as an inevitable 
test, shows to be unwarranted and incorrect. 

3. The Eastern Orthodox Communion, made 
up of many Churches, as of the Greeks, Rus- 
sians, and other nationalities, while it has pre- 
served the faith and is in other respects, so far 
as can be judged with discretion and sympathy, 
otherwise fit to be the one fold, possesses cer- 
tain characteristics which preclude other Chris- 
tians from finding in it a comforting home. It 
is distinctly oriental in its general purview. 
Its services are enormously elaborate which 
makes them unnecessarily difficult for the life 
of the Western Hemisphere to adapt itself to. 
It is rigid. Its liturgical languages, which 
vary, are all such as to be understood only by 
the respective hierarchies. An Eastern Ortho- 
dox cleric passing from one national Church to 
another is unable to celebrate the mysteries, in 
many cases, because the language outside his 
own Church is unknown to him. Even the litur- 
gical Greek, which is the language of a large 
section of Eastern Orthodoxy, is a tongue not 
generally understood even among the erudite 
outside certain portions of the Orthodox East. 

4. The Anglican Communion has often, and 
justly, been called the communion which prof- 
fers to the rest of Christendom the best meet- 
ing place for reunion. It possesses all the 
characteristics of a Catholic Communion, i. e., 
a scriptural religion, the Catholic Creeds, a 
valid ministry, and a sound liturgy. It pos- 
sesses also a certain flexibility, a learned clergy, 
a laity combining, in general, broad-mindedness 
and orthodoxy, and uniformly imbued with that 



CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 21 



peculiar quality of culture which is called pro- 
gressive and "Western;" which is making its 
way around the world and attracting to it, as the 
secular philosophy which most strongly com- 
mends itself, the leaders of the nations of the 
world. It is committed to the principle of 
liturgical expression which is locally under- 
stood; it is firm in the faith and at the same 
time adaptable to the spiritual needs of all men 
whatever their distinctive characteristics, na- 
tionally, racially, or otherwise. 

Any one of these four possible folds for man- 
kind can be criticised both favorably and ad- 
versely from an internal point of view as well 
as by an outsider. Even a list of the subjects- 
matter for such criticism would make a fair- 
sized book. It would be idle here to attempt 
even a summarization of such points. But 
while Pan-Protestantism, Roman Catholicism,* 
and Eastern Orthodoxy have each one or more 
qualities which can be urged against them as 
insuperable difficulties in the way of regarding 
any one of them as the fold for humanity; the 
fourth, Anglicanism, is not, necessarily, open 
to that criticism. At least in the view of an 
Anglican, it may be held, and conscientiously, 
that if Anglicanism could be brought up nearer 
to its own ideal; if its norm could be even a 
little more fully realized in practice, it would 
inevitably, as a valid communion of the Holy 
Catholic Church, emerge more and more clearly 
into the position of the ideal fold for the scat- 
tered sheep of Christendom as well as for the 
other sheep which are wholly without the fold. 

Is it reasonable, then, seriously to propose 



22 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



to one's fellow Anglicans, and through them to 
the rest of Christendom, that the 4 4 Basis of 
Unity" which shall be contended for by Ang- 
licans is to be Anglicanism itself? 

One may find in the Roman Catholic attitude, 
conspicuous for its uncompromising quality, a 
precedent for answering ' 6 Yes." It is not pro- 
posed that the answer, " yes," be based on any- 
thing like the same ground that makes the 
Roman Catholic adhere so rigorously to his 
own proper panacea — submission to the See of 
Rome. We have no alleged Vicegerent of God 
in Anglicanism ; we could not, if we would, base 
our contention on any such ground as the 
Roman reason. But it is fair to point out here 
that there is a precedent for the attitude sug- 
gested, and that a conspicuous and well-recog- 
nized one. 

Other kinds of Christians, when they submit 
as individuals to the Church of Rome, do so, 
necessarily, because they are willing to accept 
the papal claims in return for what they are 
accustomed to name "certainty and unity," 
forgetting or shutting their eyes to, or not being 
aware of, the very powerful forces within the 
Roman Church which make for uncertainty and 
disunity when one scratches the surface. 

But those many who come into the Anglican 
Communion do so, in general, because they want 
a valid Church connection which will include 
what has been dear to them in one or another 
kind of Protestantism ; or else, if they have been 
Romans, to find a valid Church connection 
which will be free from the characteristic 



CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 23 



Roman evils, such as need not, here, for any 
good purpose, be even enumerated. 

With this safeguard to our thought pro- 
pounded, we may go on to examine the facts 
which make the Roman claim to the allegiance 
of the rest of Christendom so attractive to many 
souls. 

First, the uniformity, external though it be, 
of the Roman Church. This apparent indica- 
tion of internal harmony, of singleness and 
definiteness of purpose makes a tremendous 
appeal to the seeker after spiritual rest and 
peace. 

Second, the efficiency of a regulated system. 

Third, the definite claim to be right. 

Fourth, the real uniformity (even though it 
be somewhat cut and dried and, to the more 
truly Catholic mind of Anglicanism, inclusive 
of various tenets which are no integral part of 
the deposition of faith) of the teaching. 

All these claims of the Roman Church are 
sound, psychologically, and as such, apart from 
their Roman source, are worthy of examination 
by any other communion which is desirous of 
making a strong appeal to prospective con- 
verts. The fact that they are characteristic of 
the Roman Church has in it nothing to invali- 
date them. This merely indicates that the 
Roman Church (and who doubts it?) is wise in 
its generation. We can see, if we put prejudice 
aside, how excellent a thing it is to possess uni- 
formity of practice and teaching, to adhere to 
a well-regulated and efficient system, and to be- 
lieve in our system so strongly as to be will- 
ing to put forward our claim in a positive man- 



24 



THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



ner; and we can see this, as it happens, not 
only by the processes of thought, but by a dem- 
onstration of how it works, when used, as it is 
by the Eoman Communion, in spite of what 
seem to others the glaring inconsistencies and 
obvious errors of that system. 

We do not, as a communion of the Holy 
Catholic Church, need to go to Eome to learn 
how to make ourselves externally and in prac- 
tice what we are ideally and in theory, and par- 
tially in fact; but there is no sound reason why 
we should ignore these various means to the 
best of good ends merely because Eome uses 
them so successfully. And when we say, as we 
often do, that Eome must reform herself be- 
fore others will listen to her, it is only just to 
apply this test to ourselves. 

In order to make anything like the appeal to 
the ignorant and the indifferent, to the millions 
upon millions of persons who are unchurched or 
untaught, or mistaught, it is primarily neces- 
sary that Anglicanism should realize its nor- 
mal self -consciousness, stop fighting internally, 
close up the ranks, and agree upon its work- 
ing principles; and then express these in its 
practice. 

To bring about that desideratum, it is clearly 
essential that one of the high points of the pro- 
cess is to develop efficiency among the leaders : 
the clergy and the church workers, and the 
laity who are in a position to exercise influence 
in the countless way which can make for the 
extention and the general betterment of the 
Kingdom of God. This fact is the justification 
for any attempt at internal betterment, and 



CULTIVATING THE GARDEN 25 



what is involved is both critical and construc- 
tive teaching and constant warfare against 
weeds. 

These blemishes in the Anglican portion of 
the Lord's Garden, some of which are here dis- 
cussed under the figure of weeds, are manifold 
and various, and undoubted. A list of them 
would be formidable, and a list which one lover 
of Anglicanism might make, would probably be 
widely different from a list made by another. 
It is a task which, when undertaken by any 
one person, can be accomplished only by the 
use of his own judgment, and in the hope of 
persuasion and of securing agreement. The 
writer attempts herein to take note of what 
appeal to his judgment as peculiarly noxious 
weeds, and to deal with each kind as best he 
can, in the same hope of being able to persuade 
and of securing agreement about them ; and of 
suggesting, as kindly and pleasantly as he may, 
the remedies indicated by his own judgment. 
Many doubtless, will not agree with that judg- 
ment; some, perhaps, may be assisted. 

Such a list would include, he thinks, what to 
him appear to be outstanding blemishes in the 
Anglican portion of the Garden, and a chapter 
is devoted to the discussion of each. These are : 
1. A certain smug satisfaction with something 
vague understood as the Reformation Settle- 
ment. 2. Being a Jack of All Trades in the 
Ministry. 3. The widespread substitution of 
what may be called the Sidewalk Ministry for 
the Ministry of the Sanctuary. 4. The still 
more widespread ignorance among lay people 
of the reason for church attendance. 5. The 



26 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



unwillingness to recognize the mind of the 
Church with respect to clerical marriage; and 
eyes being closed to the fact that this vital ques- 
tion is primarily economic and temperamental, 
rather than a question of << churchmanship. r ' 
6. The deplorable ineptitude in the matter of the 
art of public worship which still prevails in our 
communion. 7. The misunderstandings related 
to work among the foreign-born, and especially 
the prepossession in favour of basing such 
work chiefly upon what is called Social Service. 
8. The toleration of that insidious process 
called 6 6 M odernism ' ' which seeks to replace the 
Christian Religion within the Church with an 
emulsion of panaceas. 9. The particular ab- 
surdity, prominent in such 6 6 Modernism, 99 of 
substituting an ideal, called Happiness, for the 
ideal of knowing and loving God, and serving 
Him because He is known and loved. 10. The 
literary tendency, with its reaction upon the 
popular mind, to make the popular conception 
of Almighty God into something fundamentally 
heretical, and to represent the clergy as being 
uniformly afflicted with a kind of softening of 
the brain. 11. The over-emphasis upon purely 
academic subjects in the Church's seminaries, 
and the corresponding neglect of practical 
training in the routine duties of the parish 
clergyman. 12. The outstanding peculiarities 
of the clerical character and of that of church 
workers in general, which might, to the advan- 
tage of all concerned, be minimized to the point 
of negligibility. 

When our Lord spoke His parable of the 
tares, and laid down the principle that these 



CULTIVATING THE GAKDEN 27 



must be allowed to grow with the good grain 
until such time as the Head Gardener should 
be ready to separate and garner His wheat, He 
was not dealing with wrong conditions ; He was 
dealing with wrong people. This teaching of 
our Lord's is often urged against various kinds 
of criticism, but it is an open question whether 
or not such urgency is merely a pious cloak 
for inertia. Our Lord's counsel on this point 
deals with the tendency of puritanism to de- 
stroy him with whom the puritan finds himself 
out of agreement, rather than with the pro- 
priety of correcting manifest abuse. He was 
outspoken when it came to characterizing the 
Pharisees, and vigorously active when, in the 
zeal of His Father's House, He drove out the 
money changers and them that sold cattle and 
doves, and cleansed the Temple. It is only in 
a spirit of profound humility, therefore, that 
anyone may venture to set forth a body of 
criticism which shall be concerned with the 
members of His Body, even in the light of His 
own great example, and of the precedents He 
set for the renewal of God's planting. 



n 



A Neglected Source of Information 

If anyone desires to learn anything, there 
are, in a broad, general way, three sources open 
to him: the past, the present, and the future. 

For example, if one desires to know all there 
is to be known of aviation, it must be taken for 
granted that although much has already been 
accomplished in this marvellous field, the great 
work of the fliers lies in the future. Predic- 
tions are especially valuable here. The aspir- 
ant in aviation must "look into the future" — 
he must have vision. The Wright brothers and 
the others who have succeeded these pioneers 
in practical flying had vision, and therefrom 
they derived much of their inspiration and 
even something of their technic. For a convinc- 
ing exposition of this seemingly singular point 
of view, anyone who might be at first inclined 
to question the saneness of that statement may 
be referred to chapter one, "Forecasting the 
Future," in Mr. H. G. Wells' "What Is Com- 
ing." 

If engineering, or especially manufacturing 
and business administration, be the object of 
serious study, the present is the great time 
wherein to find the sources for such study, 
because these things appear to-day to be at 
their crest of accomplishment. 

28 



NEGLECTED INFORMATION 29 



But there are many things — most, in fact, 
considering the whole subject quantitatively — 
which can only be learned by looking intelli- 
gently into the past. The great matter of 
Gothic architecture is one of these; staining 
glass, a concomitant minor art, is another. If 
it be held that Anglicans do not need to learn 
from the Church of Rome, devotion and disci- 
pline, and how to do things ecclesiastically, it is 
a far cry from holding that there is not much 
to be learned from the great past of our own 
communion. 

We have in the Anglican Communion a 
definite life and a definite development, such as 
it is; very strong in some respects, lamentably 
weak in others, and this life and this develop- 
ment both have their roots deep in the past. 
It is not enough to go back merely to the period 
of the Reformation. It is well known that the 
processes of the English Reformation did not 
— the berserker personality of Martin Luther 
being fortunately lacking — irremediably dam- 
age the ship of the Church when its barnacles 
were forcibly scraped off. Luther removed the 
barnacles from the German ship effectually, 
and he ripped away many a good plank with 
them. In the storm and stress of the English 
Reformation, however, very much dropped out 
of sight which has only very gradually emerged 
since. It is possible that a brief estimate of 
that which was bad, defective, and inefficient in 
the pre-reformation English Church, followed 
by another summary of what was good, admir- 
able, and effective might do something towards 
clearing the ground for those of us who desire 



30 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



to play our parts in the process of legitimate 
restoration and improvement. It is impossible 
here to do more than very briefly to touch upon 
these associated abuses and admirable qualities 
of the mediaeval Church in England; but with- 
out any attempt to be exhaustive, enough may 
be included in such summaries to demonstrate 
that there is something here worth understand- 
ing. 

Beginning, then, with the bad side of things, 
we take up and examine cursorily certain con- 
ditions in mediaeval Anglicanism which stand 
out prominently; and then proceed to enumer- 
ate certain others, pausing only to note, in ad- 
vance, that most if not all of the outstanding 
bad conditions have been effectively reformed 
or at least alleviated. 

1. English dioceses in the Middle Ages were 
so huge that the bishops, even if they had been 
so disposed, could hardly have done their full 
duty. But the bishops, as a rule, were unwill- 
ing to have them divided. Most of the higher 
clergy were occupied at least in part with sec- 
ular activities. They used their church offices 
as sources of revenue and so far as their per- 
sonal attention was concerned, appear to have 
neglected much of what we, looking backward, 
see might have been done. Many, of course, 
were non-residents. Even ordinations seem to 
have been regarded by some as of less impor- 
tance than secular affairs and the ever-present 
question of their incomes. Simony and plural- 
ism flourished broadcast. 

2. There were unquestionably cases of abuse 
of the celibacy which was the rule for the 



NEGLECTED INFORMATION 31 



clergy, regular and secular alike. In many in- 
stances ignorant men were ordained, and thou- 
sands never advanced beyond the minor orders, 
which, because of the Privilege of Clergy, at- 
tracted the unfit, the worldly, and the schemers. 

3. Private chapels such as were scattered 
over the land in great numbers especially near 
the end of the Middle Ages were chiefly served 
by clergy so little trained and so unspiritual 
that even to-day the term "chantry priest" 
connotes something bad, defective, and ineffi- 
cient. 

4. The See of Rome claimed ecclesiastical 
jurisdiction in England, and for a period in the 
heart of the Middle Ages it held England also 
as a temporal dependency. Its influence on 
England and the English Church was very bad 
in many respects. The papacy seems to have 
exercised little fostering care over the English- 
Church. Nevertheless, it demanded obedience. 
It filled a large proportion of English Church 
offices with foreigners, many of whom drew 
their revenues while performing none of the 
duties or functions of the offices. It exacted 
immense sums of money in Aids, Annates, Fees 
for Investitures, and various legal fees. It 
caused exasperating delays in the issuance of 
judgments and wasted the time and the re- 
sources of litigants in painful and expensive 
journeys to and from Rome. The subtlety and 
hypocrisy of its decisions were not in general 
accord with the robust English conception of 
justice. At the worst, it may be said that the 
papacy was, in its relations with England, 
grasping, dishonest, and insatiable. At best, 



32 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



it may be held that it laid too much stress 
upon its usurped jurisdiction in temporal mat- 
ters to have been otherwise than unfit to serve 
as a proper spiritual head for the Church of 
England. 

5. Monasticism may be called the heart of 
English church life in the Middle Ages. And 
monasticism possesses a very definite bad side 
which must be included in this summary — a 
side which did much to counterbalance its well- 
known features of excellence. As early as the 
XII century a great number of monasteries be- 
came imbued with the type of secularity de- 
rived from and peculiar to the feudal system 
under which the great orders flourished. Great 
religious houses, at the time of their highest 
prosperity, in the XIII century, controlled as 
much as one-third of the land in England, 
which, in many instances, was administered 
selfishly as monastic decay began to set in. 
The essence of such decay is found in the 
phenomenon of the order coming to regard 
itself as an end to be served, rather than as a 
very important means of serving the Church 
and God's people. One of the first and most 
obvious results is to be seen in the administra- 
tion of the real property held by the order. 

It must also be admitted that a greal deal 
of time was wasted in the monastic life, which 
might have been devoted to something more 
spiritually construcitve than the overlong and 
many-times-multiplied services, and the gross 
over-emphasis upon the practices of asceticism 
in which much of the energy of really sincere 
and devoted men was dissipated. 



NEGLECTED INFORMATION 33 



The monasteries got into their control a great 
deal of the revenue which should have been 
secured to the parish churches, and as a con- 
sequence the secular clergy became less and less 
adequately supported, and great numbers of 
parishes received a relatively inadequate sup- 
ply of spiritual ministrations. 

The exemption from episcopal visitation and 
control enjoyed by many great religious houses 
— the well-known rights of religious apart — 
became in England a fertile source of evil. For 
the exempt monasteries were naturally in close 
alliance with the papacy, whence the privilege 
of exemption was derived, and this division of 
allegiance could not help but make for harm 
and disunion. 

Rivalry between various orders and houses 
was not lacking, but instead of this rivalry 
taking the sound form of vieing with each other „ 
in spirituality and good works, the contests 
were only too frequently over the acquisition 
or retention of wealth or distinction, high posi- 
tion, privilege, and power. Thus secularity had 
many opportunities to grow apace even in these 
strongholds of God, and public confidence 
waned correspondingly. 

6. The decline of the friars, beginning near 
the end of the XIII century, was paralleled by 
the spiritual decline in the monasteries, but in 
all probability it demoralized the people to a 
greater extent than the monastic deterioration 
alone could have accomplished, because the 
friars had gradually grown to be closer to the 
people than had the monks. The influence 
which these once fervent evangelists and re- 



34 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 

formers of everyday life had acquired was un- 
doubtedly very powerful among the common 
people. Their terrible lapse into petty pilfer- 
ers and peddling privilege-mongers is, without 
question, closely allied with the contemporary 
decline in popular piety. The salt was begin- 
ning to lose its savour and it was not long be- 
fore it was to be cast out and trampled under- 
foot of men. 

7. Allied with the curses of papal domina- 
tion and the decadence of the religious life, was 
the curse of dirt. Sanitation, as we understand 
the term to-day, was undreamed of in the Mid- 
dle Ages and long afterwards. Cleanliness was 
no conspicuous virtue, and dirt covered human- 
ity, layman and cleric alike. This is a general 
condition, of course, and as such could by itself 
have no particular bearing upon the good and 
bad sides of Anglican church life. Such bear- 
ing lies in the fact that vermin and muck came 
to be regarded as adjuncts of asceticism. Lords 
of the realm, bishops, priests, and scullions, 
court ladies, and kitchen knaves reeked with 
unwholesome filth, which may have helped to 
keep out the cold, but which at the same time 
invited the pestilence. It is true that the Eng- 
lish Church was neither better nor worse than 
her Continental contemporaries in failing to 
perceive and denounce this horror. While we 
may, and justly, commend as wholesome the 
philosophy of the hair shirt, and reverence its 
godly wearers for what they were (and are), 
we can hardly fail to shudder over the condi- 
tion of the great and good Beeket's body when 
with loving care his clergy stripped the costly 



NEGLECTED INFORMATION 35 



outer fabrics away from the gaping wounds, 
and, finding their late Lord Archbishop swarm- 
ing with vermin beneath, praised God amain 
that here indeed was a true saint ! 

We turn joyfully to the consideration of some 
of the outstanding good points of the mediaeval 
English Church. 

1. The Church was so effectively established 
as the religion of the English people that no- 
where in the land could a spot be found wherein 
its beneficent influence was not active. Among 
the thousands of parishes into which the great 
dioceses were divided, and whose glorious ar- 
chitectural fabrics are the inspiration and the 
despair of modern church builders, there were 
distributed probably as many as twenty thou- 
sand clergy. These, unhampered by many of 
the secondary interests which absorb so much 
of the time of the modern clergy, spent their, 
lives, their energies, and such learning as they 
possessed in guiding the spiritual lives of the 
people. Undistracted by sectarian rivalries, 
aided by the vast momentum of national enthu- 
siasm for the Church, supported by the animat- 
ing spirit of a "Church unity" so thorough- 
going as to have elicited no descriptive phrase, 
these clergy, many of them trained in the uni- 
versities, guided their flocks from the cradle 
to the grave. 

2. It may safely be averred that the English 
clergy were more virtuous than their Conti- 
nental brethren. Even the higher clergy, for 
all their preoccupation with secular affairs and 
their political activity, were not only very good 
examples of political honesty, but also, on the 



36 



THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD 



whole, superior in piety to the clergy of other 
lands, who had, more than the English Church 
dignitaries, the disadvantage of earlier and 
longer exposure to continental culture, and 
closer relations with the papacy. 

3. The Church conserved and fostered learn- 
ing. To a preponderating extent the education 
of the young was in the hands of the clergy, 
and here, above all things else in immediate 
practical importance, we might with profit look 
back five or six centuries and learn something 
greatly to the advantage of the Christian 
Religion. 

4. Side by side with its educational preoccu- 
pation and intertwined with it, was the practice 
of the fine arts, which the Church of England 
in the Middle Ages fostered with gracious care. 
The breach between the Church and the fine 
arts to-day is perhaps the widest of the clefts 
which time and ineptitude have together suc- 
ceeded in making, to the infinite disadvantage 
of both the Church and the arts, to say nothing 
of the artists. The average Church building 
to-day is, most unhappily, a meretricious monu- 
ment to this divorce, while in many quarters 
' i artist ' 9 and ' 6 pagan 9 9 are terms which go hand 
in hand. This is not to say that there are no 
godly artists or no artistic Churches ; but both, 
most unfortunately, are conspicuous by their 
singularity. 

5. Until their decadence — which was a rela- 
tively slow process — had made great inroads in 
the religious life, the monasteries offered a 
peculiarly effective means of serving God. 
Among other things the monasteries were re- 



NEGLECTED INFORMATION 37 



sponsible for caring for innumerable travelers 
and sick persons, supplying the places now held 
by the hotels and the hospitals. The religious 
life needs no commending phrases to demon- 
strate that it is, in itself, the finest flower of 
Christ's religion. The monasteries were full 
of faith which expressed itself in a multiplicity 
of beautiful lives and effective good works. 

6. Widespread individual and corporate 
piety supplied the material needs of the Church, 
and the Church, transmuting these gifts by her 
alchemy into spiritual benefits, gave them back 
with a generous hand to the people. It is espe- 
cially notable, for example, that just after the 
Norman Conquest, when the last of the long 
series of racial amalgamations was taking place 
in England, the monasteries formed the back- 
bone of the Church, fortifying the religious 
character of the English people so that, cen- 
turies later, it was able to withstand the ter- 
rible stress of the reformation movement which 
swept Europe like a tornado, and come through 
that violent upheaval nearly unscathed. The 
general character of the English Church and 
the English people, which may be described as 
full-blooded, rugged, honest, earnest, and inde- 
pendent, owes an incalculable debt to the re- 
ligious life as it was lived in the monasteries 
of the XI, XII, and XIII centuries. Clergy and 
people took their religion seriously. 

7. The missionary activity of the friars — at 
its height in the early part of the XIII century 
— besides bringing a renewed spirituality to the 
people at large, must also be regarded in the 
light of its tremendous power for stimulating 



38 THE GARDEN OP THE LORD 



the secular clergy. The parochial clergy were 
aroused by emulation to express themselves in 
a great amount of instruction and catechizing 
among their people. A lively renewal of faith 
was the natural outcome. 

8. Among the characteristic modes of medi- 
aeval expression in ecclesiastical England, it is 
unnecessary to do more than merely state that 
the high point in the art of church building was 
reached in this period. The very best that the 
most skilful builders can accomplish in this 
field to-day is to imitate the churches of the 
Middle Ages more or less successfully. 

It is difficult to imagine a parish priest 
of this period neglecting some of his routine 
duties because by their performance he might 
possibly give offense to some of his parishion- 
ers! It was an age of faith, of faith inevitably 
expressed in practice, and so the religion of 
Christ lived in the hearts and showed itself in 
the lives of men and women and children. The 
age had its glaring faults, but while we depre- 
cate any resumption of these, or acquiesce in 
the historic rejection of them which the refor- 
mation partially accomplished, we should be 
indeed very short-sighted if we should fail to 
realize how much we might learn from the ex- 
ample and practice of our own Church at a 
time when it possessed in marked degree the 
very sense of discipline and devotion and of 
"knowing how," the lack of which is its chief 
weakness to-day. 

If it be kept in mind that here is the source 
whence we may derive the methods for much 
or most of our reconstructive work, there need 



NEGLECTED INFORMATION 39 



be no disposition among us to feel that we are 
constrained either to let these matters go by 
the board, or to learn them from the current 
practice of an alien and hostile communion. 

In the reformation which took place in the 
affairs of our own communion, the activity of 
the reformers took the wise form of getting rid 
of real abuses, so far as might be, and retain- 
ing as much as possible of what they believed 
to be good, and sound, and workable. They 
made an infinitude of minor mistakes in the 
light of the present, and not a few major errors, 
but they did not fail, as the various Continental 
reformers failed, to conserve the catholicity of 
the Church, and that fact is enough to cover 
a multitude of ineptitudes. In the light of this 
universally acknowledged truth, it is, perhaps, 
not too much to ask, even of those who seem 
to believe that all later development was, 
estopped by something called the Reformation 
Settlement, that they should very seriously con- 
sider doing, or allowing to be done, the restor- 
ative work of the present in the same spirit 
which actuated the historical reformers them- 
selves. This is a very simple principle. It in- 
volves no more than willingness not to reject 
everything in the life and spirit of Anglicanism 
which flourished before the day of the second 
of the Tudor kings of unwholesome memory. 
There is higher authority than Cranmer's for 
the precept which enjoins us who have Christ's 
Body in our keeping to "hold fast to that which 
is good." 



Ill 



On "Efficiency" 

All clergy are professional Christians, liv- 
ing by the gospel. And all professional per- 
sons, doctors, lawyers, dentists, pilots, actors, 
have to consider the opinions of the people they 
serve. Only the great ones of earth can ordi- 
narily afford to ignore public opinion, and some 
even of these have fallen grievously because 
of such an attitude. 

This general truth has laid such hold upon 
the clergy that many of them, it is to be feared, 
forgetting that their professional status differs 
fundamentally from all others because it is a 
vocation, and failing it may be to keep con- 
stantly before their eyes that their responsibil- 
ity is to God, have framed their lives upon the 
principle that the people must be pleased. The 
result is what has often been called the 1 6 good 
mixer," or something equally banal and inept, 
in far too many cases. 

A "good mixer," or the like, is very apt to 
be incompetent in his profession because he is 
prone to rely upon what he likes to call his 
personality ! There ought to be at least a sense 
of balance in this matter. When anyone is 
suffering from an agonizing toothache what 
he wants is a skilful dentist, not at all the no- 
toriously pleasant practitioner whose reputa- 

40 



ON "EFFICIENCY" 



41 



tion depends almost wholly upon the slapping 
of people 's backs in a hearty manner and play- 
ing eighteen holes of golf with neatness and 
dispatch. 

A pastor's peculiar work is done with souls 
for materials, and what he is for is to bring 
men and women and children to know, to love, 
and to serve God. The processes involved in 
this work are not simple. Rather, they are ex- 
traordinarily variable, diverse, and complex. 
So far as personality is concerned in this kind 
of work, whatever views on that subject may 
be held by anyone, it may still be taken as 
axiomatic that however well versed a clergy- 
man may be in the duties of his office, an ugly 
disposition must give at least some people the 
idea that God Himself is grim and dour and 
difficult of approach. When a clergyman is con- 
fronted with the tragedies of life, the great 
simple things like birth and death, and the 
great complicated things like anguish and neur- 
asthenia, no amount of attractive playfulness, 
tact, or even such matters as successful boy- 
scouting will be able to help him very much in 
dealing with them, nor will they be of any par- 
ticular value to his dying or sin-racked par- 
ishioner. 

It is altogether reasonable for a professional 
Christian to cultivate his personality and to 
make himself as well-informed, agreeable, and 
presentable as he can. But if he is to accom- 
plish the burdensome task which has been laid 
upon him — the saving of immortal souls — if he 
is to persevere under the ever-increasing load 
which bows the backs and thins the hair of true 



42 THE GABDEN OF THE LORD 



shepherds of God's flock, he must be more, 
infinitely more, than personally delightful; 
more even, than "consecrated;" more than an 
upright citizen who can look any man in the 
face. He must be professionally skilful, or he 
is very likely to turn out a failure, an unprofit- 
able servant. 

It may be that the clergyman or the candi- 
date for Holy Orders is a kind of natural pastor. 
One meets, occasionally, such a man. That is a 
legitimate subject for congratulation. God and 
His Church need many just such persons, fitted 
naturally for pastoral work. But even this 
kind of man must needs learn how. And this 
must be said, plainly : that no candidate is very 
likely to learn very much of the technic of his 
pastoral office in his seminary. Some semi- 
naries ignore nearly everything, in the purview 
of the pastoral office, except "scholarship." 
Others try to accomplish more, but it is rightly 
enough felt by trustees and faculty that the 
young men preparing academically for ordina- 
tion must be grounded in the prescribed subjects 
in the all-too-scant three years at the disposal 
of the faculty. We must admit that most men 
come to the diaconate with the academic por- 
tions of their capabilities well enough developed 
and reasonably disciplined, but with only very 
general ideas of the detailed daily work of their 
sacred profession. 

An appreciable number of men emerge from 
seminaries fairly well prepared for the prac- 
tical work of the priesthood, and most of what 
they know they have picked up, perhaps before 
getting as far as the seminary, in the parish 



ON "EFFICIENCY" 43 



wherein they derived the first intimations of a 
vocation. Befuge against accusations of in- 
effective, practical preparation on the part of 
the seminary is commonly taken in the tacit 
understanding that the deacon will pick up what 
he may need to know during the curacy which 
the Canons contemplate; and often he does so, 
but too often he has to depend upon himself, 
and too often he has no opportunities of the 
kind save to serve tables, which is entirely 
scriptural and orthodox, and which would be 
entirely effective if the young man were to 
continue in the office and doing the work of a 
deacon for the rest of his life. 

Here is the place, it would appear, to say 
something about the wooden Anglican policy 
of keeping a man from Holy Orders until he 
is just finishing at the seminary, and then send- 
ing him out as a deacon to do parish work "for 
the space of a whole year. ' ' If such an one were 
invariably sent into a parish under at least one 
trained priest, it is possible that in the course 
of the year he might learn the fundamental 
duties which he will be called upon to perform 
for the remainder of his ministry as a priest. 
But even at that, the system is needlessly in- 
efficient. There is no good reason at all why 
(as in the case of most dioceses and at least 
in accordance with the policy of all but one 
American seminary) the young man should not 
come out of the seminary a priest equipped for 
the work of a priest. So far as anyone can see, 
the only practical differences between a deacon 
and a lay reader are that the deacon can assist 
in the administration of the Holy Communion, 



44 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



perform a legal marriage, and baptize in the 
absence of a priest, while a lay reader may not. 
When it is considered, too, that deacons coming 
out of the seminary are more often than not 
placed in charge of missions or even parishes, 
— although, of course, not canonically as rec- 
tors, that being impossible — the ineptitude of 
this plan becomes more apparent. One might, 
save for the prestige of having a person who 
can write "Reverend" before his name, almost 
as well have a lay reader in charge as a deacon. 

On the other hand, the order of deacons 
might well have a place in the work of the 
Church which no one, apparently, thinks of 
according to it. There are any number of men 
who ought to be deacons because they are doing 
the characteristic work of deacons, to say noth- 
ing of the women so employed. There seems 
to be no good reason why positions of the ad- 
ministrative and secretarial class which are 
commonly filled by lay people of both sexes, 
should not, and preferably, be filled by men in 
deacons' orders. An increase in the number 
of deacons would also release a great many 
priests from executive positions not in any way 
requiring priests to fill them. 

Of professional ineptitude it would be very 
easy to give a catena of examples. It is unneces- 
sary, however, in that or in any other way to 
emphasize that the Anglican Communion's 
weakest point is her discipline. It may fairly 
be asked how many clergy at graduation and 
first ordination have as clear an idea of their 
duties as, say, a newly doctored medico step- 
ping into his first hospital appointment. 



ON "EFFICIENCY" 45 



One gathers that there are very few, and one 
reaches this conclusion because of the very 
scant attention paid to technic by the clergy as 
a body. There is perhaps nothing in the whole 
range of professional skill so variable as the 
ability to do their work among Anglican clergy- 
men. 

It is not, of course, in the slightest degree 
desirable that there should be any diminution 
in the seminary emphasis upon Greek and He- 
brew, and especially Church History, and the 
other subjects chiefly taught. Let us Anglicans 
conserve at any reasonable cost of effort our 
hardly-earned status as a Church with a learned 
clergy, and not make practical efficiency either a 
shibboleth or an alternative to sound academic 
learning. But for practical purposes pastoral 
theology ought to have much greater emphasis 
than it is getting in our schools. This should be, 
done, and the other not left undone. Mere 
studiousness is not enough in a clergyman. 
Many a clergyman is a monument of learning 
and does not know how to hear a confession. 
Many a clergyman's parochial work might be 
compared justly to a great burst of accompani- 
ment with hardly any song. Many a one knows, 
as it were, all that is known of dendrology and 
silviculture and the exact points of differences 
between these two branches of forestal science, 
as well as all that is to be known of the history 
of implement-making from the Assyrian period 
down through history to the present day, — and 
could not drive a nail into a plank with a ham- 
mer to save his life and the roof over his head. 
This academic dufferism is positively en- 



46 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



trenched in some parts of the Church, and espe- 
cially in England among the country clergy 
with benefices and hobbies. It is not fair to 
God, and it bears very hard on God's people. 
Not the least damaging effect of this sort of 
thing is that the people become habituated to it, 
expect no more, even admire their pastor for 
his great learning, and so, spiritually, fall into 
a kind of creeping paralysis. 

The writer had several years of intimate con- 
tact, some time ago, with a very able young 
priest who had come into the Anglican from the 
Roman Communion and whose exact knowledge 
of certain workings of both communions was 
illuminating, and not infrequently amusingly 
pointed in its expression. He was accustomed 
to sum up one of his dissertations with some- 
thing like this: "The Romans have got to 
learn from us how to make their people use their 
heads, and that there is such a thing as history. 
But — I get rather wild when I think — what a 
lot we've got to learn from them about disci- 
pline and devotion and how to do things ! 9 J 

One can understand, and to some extent sym- 
pathize with, this viewpoint. It is very often 
maddening to contemplate the helplessness of 
the average group of clergy discussing some 
problem and how to get it done ; bewailing the 
lethargy of their congregations; or disputing 
learnedly enough about this or that. One can, 
in particular, feel pleased at the first part of 
the statement. It is true that the Romans 
might find it hard to procure a better school- 
master than the Anglican consciousness when 
it came to learning how to use their heads and 



ON "EFFICIENCY" 



47 



that there is such a thing as history. In con- 
troversy, the Anglican prevails over the Roman 
with a regularity and effectiveness which is 
almost monotonous, because the Anglican knows 
how to use his head and is familiar with his- 
tory. But it may be a source of comfort, when 
we realize how far behind Rome we are in the 
results of our efforts towards building up dis- 
cipline and devotion and practicality, to remem- 
ber that there is an Anglican norm, however in 
any given place it may appear to have become 
obscured. W e do not need to learn these things 
from Rome, although it may be wholesome for 
us to look over at Rome and see how efficient 
she is. For history is pretty definitely fixed 
and settled, and no one has ever attempted to 
lower the standard of Anglican learning; but 
the ideal discipline, devotion, and pastoral effi- 
ciency of Anglicanism is a very different ideal 
from the Roman ideal. 

We have, for example, very definitely aban- 
doned or repudiated such working tools as in- 
dulgences, and enforced penances, and an infal- 
lible pope. All of these are excellent tools, if 
one can use them, but Anglicans cannot use 
them, for they are plying a different though re- 
lated trade. Roman Catholic Church law is 
tremendously efficient law, but ours is different. 
Ours is not derived from forged decretals or a 
spurious ' ' donation. ' ' Our working system ap- 
pears to be a somewhat milder, more reason- 
able, honester, more scriptural, and less drastic 
system. And the best thing about it is that it 
is entirely effective, when anyone takes the 
trouble to find out about it and use it. The 



48 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



seminary is the natural place to learn about 
it, of course. 

It would be hard to find a better application 
of the rule "by their fruits ye shall know 
them," than the efficiency of what is generally 
known as the Anglican "advanced" Catholic 
Parish. Without saying a word about ' 6 Church- 
manship" in this connection, one may freely 
refer to the "Advanced" Parish simply because 
it works so well. The secret of that obvious 
efficiency — shown in regular attendance, spiri- 
tual lives well led, material results accomplished 
out of all relation to the proportion of wealth 
commonly found in such parishes when com- 
pared with the richer places wherein other 
types of Churchmanship prevail — is definite, 
painstaking, skilful, intelligent, informed, par- 
ish work on the part of the clergy. The one 
intelligent accusation ever brought against such 
pastoral work is that it is "mechanical." But 
in fact it only resembles that. Nothing that is 
alive— like an "Advanced" Parish — is merely 
mechanical. 

Like other similar movements the current 
trend of thought towards efficiency has gathered 
about it much that is crude and even laughable. 
Efficiency is too often overdone and grotesquely 
overdone. Humorous tales have even appeared 
in magazines with "efficiency" as their motif. 
"Efficiency Edgar" may pass into the language 
as a synonym for a certain type of enthusiast 
who was very amusing to those who read about 
him in the late current publications. But leav- 
ing out of account this modern over-emphasis 
which threatens to grow into a cult, the fact 



ON "EFFICIENCY" 49 



remains that the word's opposite ' i inefficiency, ' ' 
is to be always condemned and surmounted by 
workers who desire to accomplish anything 
worth while. If "efficiency" is overdone in the 
fields of business administration and scientific 
pedagogy, there is no good reason to acquiesce 
in its neglect by the Church of God. It need 
not be underdone. One may even take "Effi- 
ciency Edgar" in all his crudity and ludicrous- 
ness, and hold him up as an example, with these 
words in his mouth: "Let them make fun of 
me as much as they want to. I'm the one who 
gets the laughs when the pay envelope comes 
'round!" This is the gist of "Edgar's" justi- 
fication for his practice of the cult. And this, 
curiously enough, wall bear a certain comparison 
with another speech made nearly twenty cen- 
turies ago and recorded of a certain employed 
man who had not been timid about using his 
brains and managing with all his skill a certain * 
trust reposed in his efficient hands. The words 
of this speech are: "Well done, thou good 
and faithful servant." 



IV 



Knowing One's Sheep 

The writer once knew a clergyman, rector of 
a New England parish, who went about without 
a hat because, said he, the Founder of Chris- 
tianity went about with no covering for His 
head. It is quite clear that this is an absurd 
thing to do without any analysis or assigning 
of reasons ; but, upon analysis, several reasons 
do stand out as grounds for the patent absurd- 
ity. 

Thus : the act was an imitatio Christi based 
upon a purely external and unimportant cir- 
cumstance, and even on this low plane it was 
an inadequate imitation. It did not go far 
enough. The imitator should have copied the 
various articles of dress in question and worn 
them. A better imitation would have been to 
wear the ordinary garments of one's day and 
generation, precisely as the Lord did. Any 
imitation should concern itself with things of 
more importance than wearing apparel. Going 
about without a hat is silly in the winter climate 
of New England. 

"And so ad infinitum." 

The fact, however, that absurdities can be, 
and are, based upon this and kindred pious 
motives, should not of course be taken as pre- 
cluding a legitimate imitatio Christi. Clearly 

50 



KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 51 



enough His example should, in every such case, 
be carefully noted. Anyone, one would imagine, 
would concede that much. 

Very well! It is a fact that there is no 
recorded instance of His entering a dwelling — 
the divine prototype of the modern pastoral call 
— except when he was invited, or sent for, or 
when He was seeking entertainment. As in the 
conspicuous case of Zacchaeus, He did, from 
time to time, seek out entertainment for Him- 
self and His followers, and His great works 
were often incidental to the opportunities so 
afforded; witness the conversion of the Chief 
Publican of Jericho with all his house. 

Although no one, surely, would care to press 
this analogy too far, this precedent is not with- 
out its value. It would be as absurd as the 
incident of the hat to allege, for example, that 
because Christ did not write — except once in 
the sand at His feet — Christ's ministers should 
not write. That interpretation would cut both 
ways. I would, on the one hand, have pre- 
vented this book from appearing, and Cyrus 
Townsend Brady and Ealph Waldo Emerson 
would have been constrained, for self-expres- 
sion, to the limitations of the pulpit and the 
lecture platform. And there would be no Gul- 
liver, and, alack! no Ealph Connor. On the 
other hand, various bookshelves would have 
been free for all time from Collections of 
Sermons, the Institutes of Calvin, and the col- 
lected Works of the late E. P. Roe. 

It is reasonable, and true, to say that Christ 
did not exercise His ministry by means of the 
written word, and that, by this analogy, we 



52 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



should not be justified in making the production 
of letters, books, articles, pamphlets, and other 
literary productions a panacea in the exercise 
of the ministry to-day. 

Christ's ministry, whatever social conse- 
quences may justly be adduced from it, was 
wholly personal and intimate, and yet the fact 
remains, the significant fact, that He did not 
make what could be compared with the modern 
parish call. It is contended, therefore, that so 
far as the light of this consideration leads us, 
we ought to be able to see that the parish call 
is a secondary and subordinate means of recon- 
ciling the people to God. 

With peculiar force the axiom, " These things 
ye should have done and not left the other un- 
done," applies to the proper relationship be- 
tween a minister's calling, and the performance 
of his other necessary pastoral duties, some of 
them fundamental. 

And it ought to be unmistakable that in ap- 
plying the axiom the terms must not get them- 
selves reversed. With many clergymen, calling 
is a panacea, an obsession. They seem to apply 
the axiom thus: "Call anyhow, and get the 
other things done if you can squeeze them in!" 
That appears to be very different from Christ's 
methods of "reaching people." It does not 
seem to be the reasonable nor the efficient 
method, and probably it can be shown how it 
fails to get the results desired by the good 
pastor either in terms of spiritual or material 
values ; because it is a clear case of putting the 
cart to pull the horse. 

It must be admitted that this question of 



KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 



53 



pastoral calling is one of the vexed questions — 
not only in the art of Pastoral Theology, but in 
the minds of practically everybody who belongs 
to a church — and there are still a good many 
left in these days. There may be said to be two 
camps, sharply divided over this question. Ex- 
tremists on the one hand hold that the parish 
clergyman has too much otherwise to do, to 
permit of his calling on his people at all except 
when sent for or invited. The other side con- 
tends that "pulling doorbells" will, in time, 
cure all the ills to wiiich flesh is heir. 

There are five possible kinds of calls : 1 . The 
sick call. 2. The "fractional" call. 3. The 
social call. 4. The "round of calls" call. 5. 
The "doorbell "call. 

1. The sick call requires no discussion in this 
place, because it is one of the central, funda- 
mental duties of the pastor. Such visits must, 
and should be made whatever else may or may 
not be done. 

2. By the "functional" call is meant every 
kind of visit for which there is ' 6 efficient cause, ' ' 
i. e., reasonable necessity, and a definite object 
in communicating with a parishioner. Par- 
ochial efficiency may frequently be greatly en- 
hanced by deputizing this kind of call, or by 
substituting for it one of the various time- 
saving devices at the disposal of modern peo- 
ple, such as the use of the telephone. For in 
many cases the "function" is discharged quite 
as well or even better by mere communication, 
or by someone other than the clergyman. The 
continued, unexplained absence of a child from 
the Church School is a proper occasion for a 



54 THE GARDEN OF THE LOED 



call of this kind. The clergyman thus desires 
to know why the child is absent. The teacher 
of the child's class will ordinarily fulfill this 
function to perfection, and, if the occasion of 
the absence is such as to require the clergy- 
man's presence (although he would probably 
have been sent for in most cases, as in illness) 
the teacher's report to that effect will make it 
possible for him to save time and energy by 
making his call prepared to minister such con- 
solation as is indicated. An objector might say 
at this point: ' ' Yes, all very well! But can 
the average minister manage to train his 
Church School teachers to be efficient like 
that?" The answer is, "He cannot, if he spends 
all his time rushing about the streets himself ! ' ' 

3. The social call is not, except very inci- 
dentally, a pastoral visit. It may be any kind 
\of a call, and discussion of it does not belong 
here, except enough summarily to dismiss it 
from consideration in this connection. 

4. The " round of calls" on the whole group 
of parishioners, made periodically, is happily 
obsolescent. Its basis in reason, so far as it 
ever had one outside the works of George Her- 
bert of fragrant memory, is on the supposition 
that the pastor must in this way keep in touch 
with his parishioners. But the custom, where 
it survives, has degenerated into the merest 
concession to prejudice, which has as its basis 
the idea that if one person is visited the others 
will probably be upset, and won't come to 
church! In any event, its use implies a parish 
wherein the people do not come to church or 
otherwise take their parts in the parish life ; a 



KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 55 



group of people who have to be " jollied along" 
or they won 't play. This custom is and always 
has been an abysmal bore both to pastor and 
people, an occasion for heartburnings, and 
even, by a strange surviving simian twist of 
the corporate parochial mind, a test of the ex- 
cellence of the pastor. The ' 6 round of calls'' 
long ago fell out of relationship with any basis 
worthy the consideration it may once have had 
in reason. Those who continue to make it are 
holding on to a moribund tradition without 
theological groundwork or any sound ecclesias- 
tical custom to back it up ; much less any basis 
which should appeal in the slightest degree to 
modern people. Even in the case of a parish 
canvass, for financial or other reasons, which 
might be thought of as transforming the 
" round" into a "functional" matter, it falls 
to the ground, because such canvasses are, in 
accordance with the best modern usage, nowa- 
days always made by committees of laymen or 
laywomen. 

In a sizable parish the "round" means hard, 
unnecessary work for the clergy, probably 
serves no good purpose whatever, and serves 
to keep alive and crystallize a thoroughly un- 
sound tradition in the minds of the people. 

5. The "doorbell" call is English rather than 
American, and bound up with "The Establish- 
ment. ' ' There is, however, a certain amount of 
the home-grown article in these United States. 
In its perfection it belongs to an Established 
Church, wherein the clergy are regarded as 
state officials with certain "rights of visita- 
tion." Its process, in the pure state, appears 



56 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



to be for the visitor to take his "district" 
street by street, and call at every house irre- 
spective of the ecclesiastical status of the 
families thus visited. It is hard to see why 
anyone should even think of making this kind 
of call in the United States, where the Church, 
D. g., is not Established, and where the pas- 
tor is not regarded as an official of the state. 

With that classification out of the way, it 
appears chiefly desirable to comment on the 
point of view of the obsessed caller. 

It ought to be ^sufficiently obvious that the 
duties of a parish clergyman who wishes to 
attend to work for which he is paid (he knows 
what he is going to get, pretty well, before he 
enters the ministry, so that point need not be 
stressed) are such as to occupy most of his 
available time. Any such parish clergyman is 
constrained to choose between doing all his 
specified duties with some degree of adequacy, 
and substituting for such a normal course of 
procedure a policy of general calling. He can- 
not do both; not with only twenty-four hours 
in the day, and the absolute necessity of sleep- 
ing and eating once in a while. 

There is a kind of man in the ministry whose 
disposition is such that if he were not a clergy- 
man, he would consider no employment except 
an "outside job." Salesmen, gas-meter in- 
spectors, postmen, policemen, men on ice 
wagons — these work at "outside jobs," quite 
distinct in genre from the vocations which 
keep a man within doors during business 
hours, such as the work of clerks and shop- 
hands, bankers, dentists, and druggists. 



KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 57 



Such an one in the ministry, one shrewdly 
suspects, is simply following his predilection 
when he insists upon basing his pastorate on 
calls. It is psychological, like so much else! 
He is insisting on an "outside job" for him- 
self. Like the person in secular life who 
would rather drive an automobile truck than 
be a bank clerk, he simply will not work in- 
doors, and, being in the trusted class of pro- 
fessions, he indulges himself. He evades that 
major portion of his proper work which lies 
indoors because, temperamentally, he does not 
enjoy it. He persuades himself that he makes 
up for this self-indulgence by pounding the 
streets and by going up and down steps. 

It is not hard for him to lapse into a settled 
philosophy over this matter. The obsessed 
caller — because it is human, and a most in- 
sidious tendency at that, to justify oneself-«- 
makes a virtue of a desirability. He has a 
great deal to say about what he calls "dili- 
gent, painstaking, consecrated parish visit- 
ing." As be approaches middle age he begins 
to think of himself, it may be, and of his peri- 
patetic activities, as rather praiseworthy on 
the whole, and he deprecates those who do not 
see eye to eye with him. He also, and quite 
naturally, flocks with his own kind, much like 
a beekeeper or a certain kind of golfer ! 

Think, too, of what the caller par excellence 
misses, and of what his congregation is de- 
prived because of this self-indulgence of his. 

A pastor should, if he is to present God's 
messages through the medium of himself, 
study. He ought really to study a great deal, 



58 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



and to read as largely and as broadly as pos- 
sible. He should — he is more or less obliged 
to — prepare somehow a good many addresses 
and sermons. He ought, of course, to do this 
particular work painstakingly ; and that means 
the devotion of much time to it. He must plan 
a great many things for other people, many of 
them important as affecting other people's 
lives — people who look to him as their guide. 
It is a responsibility ! He must inaugurate in- 
numerable activities, supervise them, and fre- 
quently take an active part in their perform- 
ance. He must write many letters ; think, occa- 
sionally at least ; sleep a reasonable number of 
hours ; eat his meals with a certain regularity, 
for his health is worth something at least; he 
must attend meetings within and without his 
parish; he must see people who make appoint- 
ments to call upon him : he must make his 
"functional" and certainly his sick calls; he 
must keep his parish books as a rule ; he must 
officiate at a good many services, both stated 
and occasional ; he very often is obliged to plan 
the affairs of his church school, and at least 
keep an eye upon it ; if he have a family he 
must give at least some time to it and to its 
affairs ; he will probably belong to at least one 
or two clerical associations, or organizations 
of secular character; one hopes that once or 
twice a year he will make some kind of 66 re- 
treat' ? for the good of his own soul and its 
refreshment; he must go about more or less 
to preach or take part in conferences ; every so 
often he ought, for all sakes, to get quite away 
from people for a vacation. 



KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 59 



But in addition to these practically fixed 
duties, for they all fall into the strait category 
of duty, he must, if he be in any wise a notable 
person apart from his parish status, contribute 
of his time and effort to the general good out- 
side his parish in one or more fields of expres- 
sion; and if he is not naturally a very foolish 
and unteachable person, he ought to make time, 
if necessary, for a modicum of wholesome 
amusement and relaxation in addition to his 
free time on vacation. 

Therefore! If he spends the bulk of his 
time walking the streets of his pastoral cure 
because he likes an "outside job," he will either 
be obliged to neglect all these necessary things 
or to choose among them, leaving out some ; or 
else make a heated effort to keep all or certain 
of them up in a scrappy, inadequate fashion. 
Such a process, either alternative, would prob- 
ably be worse than if he frankly abandoned 
them all in favour of what he will call senten- 
tiously, "knowing his sheep.' 9 That is his fav^ 
orite phrase. It is his shibboleth, to use a bib- 
lical term since we are considering parsons! 
He has it on his lips a good part of the time ; 
for this kind of pastor is usually, like the man 
in the Bible, "willing to justify himself.' 9 

Pastoral work is really a very delicate and 
exact art. It requires for performance a high 
degree of acquired skill, no matter how much 
natural aptitude moved the pastor to become a 
clergyman; and the attainment of such desir- 
able competence demands exacting preparation, 
attention, and devotion. In the spirit of this 
elevating idea, let us sum up the credit and 



60 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



debit of the two opposite views which should 
have emerged about pastoral calling. 

On the credit side it must be admitted that 
the pastor who bases his ministry upon call- 
ing, as very many pastors do, will have one 
powerful working tool forged by himself as he 
walks about the streets of his city, town, or 
village. He will have personal, intimate knowl- 
edge of his people and their affairs. He will, 
in truth, know his sheep. This, in itself, is 
magnificent. In the course of a reasonably long 
pastorate he will have, if he be possessed na- 
turally of any kindly qualities, a large group 
of intimate acquaintanceships and close friend- 
ships. But even here, on this high plane, shelter 
cannot be legitimately sought under the aegis 
of the Lord's command. It was "feed My 
sheep" that He enjoined upon Peter and the 
other Apostles. It was of Himself that He 
said: "I knoiv My sheep, and am known of 
Mine ; ' 9 so that, however great may be the force 
of the example followed, and it is the very best 
possible example, it has not the direct force of 
a divine command. 

On the debit side, however, it may fairly be 
contended that the pure caller loses infinitely 
more than he can possibly gain by adherence 
to his peculiar course. When he dies or leaves 
his parish for another he will take along with 
him all the intimate, valuable data so labor- 
iously accumulated and built up along with his 
friendships, but he will not necessarily have 
built up his parish, either as a spiritual entity 
or as an eleemosynary corporation. He will 
have made the work of his successor, any sue- 



KNOWING ONE'S SHEEP 61 



cessor, exceedingly difficult, even though an- 
other ' 6 caller ' ' succeed him. He may even have 
hurt his health — in spite of all the fresh air he 
has been breathing all these years — because of 
the stress to which he has subjected himself in 
the doing of his minimum of routine other than 
calling. He may have atrophied his scholarly 
faculties. In all probability his records will 
approach the chaotic, for the typical "caller" 
carries his facts in his head (and heart) where 
they are not, unfortunately, accessible to his 
successor. 

Besides all this, the parish will have become 
accustomed to the minimum of routine work 
being done, and much of this, on the fringe 
about its irreducibility, by the hands of others 
than the pastor. The owners of these hands 
will have become habituated to the perform- 
ance of duties which the pastor should have at- 
tended to but which he could not do — and call. 
These may not all be pleasant people. There 
was a child who prayed every night, we may 
remember, that God would make all bad peo- 
ple good, and all good people nice ! Certain of 
those good people who have still to become 
i 6 nice, ' ' will have got hold upon a certain quasi- 
authority, and the new pastor must perforce, 
choose between ineffective and slipshod meth- 
ods continuing in many cases, and what in com- 
mercial life is called a "shake-up" at the most 
inopportune possible time — just after his ar- 
rival on the scene. This unfortunate man's 
only possible "third alternative" is the exer- 
cise of tons of tact, a process exhaustingly de- 
bilitating to all concerned! 



62 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



It would constitute, perhaps, another for- 
ward movement for the church as a whole if 
the " callers ' ' would take a leaf from the book 
of that humanitarian colleague, the physician. 
It is an educative absurdity to imagine a suc- 
cessful medico spending the bulk of his precious 
time dropping in on sick and well at frequent 
intervals, building up personal friendliness 
through uninvited social contacts, and offering 
gratuitous advice during the discussion of oc- 
casional symptoms, to say nothing of the price 
of gasoline these days. That is essentially a 
modern problem! 



V 



On Church-Going 

The question of church attendance, which 
probably affects four-fifths of the population of 
these United States, has received treatment at 
many hands, and the answers when thrown to- 
gether make curious reading. There are two 
camps of those who have tried to formulate 
answers to the question, Why Do Not People 
Go to Church? There are those who believe 
that the reason is internal, that the Church 
itself is at fault. On the other hand, many be- 
lieve that the reason is outside the control of 
the Church altogether and must be looked for 
externally. 

Characteristic explanations based upon fault- 
ing the Church are these : 1. The churches have 
continued to recite creeds which have lost their 
meaning, and the inconsistency arising from 
this concession to tradition has driven thou- 
sands of honest-minded men and women out of 
sympathy and touch with organized religion. 
2. Social justice was the essence of Christian- 
ity's original message to the world, and since 
this vital aspect of Christianity is almost totally 
neglected in the churches, the masses have re- 
belled against them. 3. The very core of Chris- 
tianity is the healing of sickness. It is central 
in the gospels, and its practice was the univer- 

63 



64 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



sal credential of the primitive church. Its 
abandonment has prompted the exodus of the 
people from the churches. 4. Individual purity 
is the gist of Christ's message. The modern 
Church is so taken up with extraneous matters 
that the practice of piety and the ethical beauty 
which once crowned Christian fellowship in the 
Church have been crowded out so that the mass 
of people are no longer attracted to imitate 
conspicuous examples of personal excellence, 
and the whole Church has suffered depletion. 
5. Church services are too long and wearisome 
nowadays. People tired by the week's work 
find them a bore and prefer to get their religion 
"out in the fields with God." 

On the other hand, there is a whole group 
representative of the other school: 1. People 
want rest and relaxation on Sunday, the natural 
holiday. In former days there was nothing 
else to do on Sunday except to go to church. 
But nowadays cheap amusement has put relax- 
ation and pleasure within the reach of all, what 
with moving pictures admitting a family of five 
for the cost of a balcony seat for a play, long 
trolley rides out into the country, and the un- 
precedented cheapness of automobiles. People 
who used to be in church now like to go off for 
the day in their machines. 2. Beginning with 
Tom Paine and Ingersoll there has been a 
steady discrediting of the Bible and the Church. 
The Church rests upon the authority of the 
Bible, and the attacks of critics, once outside, 
now inside the Church itself, in breaking down 
the authority of the Bible have naturally weak- 
ened the foundations of the Church so that the 



ON CHURCH-GOING 65 



man in the street, not knowing what to think 
of the whole process, has cut the Gordian knot 
of his difficulties and abandoned a discredited 
institution. 3. It is quite possible to live a good 
life without going to church. Why should a 
man equipped with "The World's Best Ser- 
mons " and a daughter w T ho can play and sing 
hymns for him, trouble about church w r hich cuts 
into his only day of rest? One pays one's bills 
and lives respectably ; what more could one do 
if he spent all of every Sunday in church? 
Besides, people outside organized religion who 
never go to church are more charitable and de- 
cidedly pleasanter companions for the average 
person. 4. "I was forced to go when I was a 
child. Every Sunday my father made us all 
get ready, there was no escape. We had to sit 
through two hours of it mornings, get home, 
eat a cold lunch, and go back in the afternoon.^ 
How I hated it ! Now that I am a man, I never 
go myself, and I wouldn't have my children 
go through what I endured for anything in the 
world. ' ' 5. Certain persons, regular attendants 
at church, are hypocrites or otherwise show an 
inconsistency between their Sunday regularity 
and prominence in church and their weekday 
practice in business and private life. People 
who know all about them are unwilling to be 
identified with the same course of procedure, 
and they stay at home. 

It is hardly necesssary to comment on the 
various grades of mentality and personal atti- 
tude to religion revealed in these answers. 
Their diversity shows how widespread the 
question has become. People of all kinds are 



66 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



busily engaged in making excuses for not going 
to church and the same people are asking why 
church attendance falls off. If any one of these 
solutions were the one true answer, the others 
w r ould be relatively unimportant. If all were 
reasonably sound the whole matter could be 
reduced to a discussion about the relative 
importance of internal and external reasons for 
not going to church. One side would hold that 
there exists a kind of impersonal conspiracy 
against the churches and that the age of modern 
inventions and cheap transportation had struck 
its powerful blow in the age-long battle between 
science and religion, while the other would hold 
to the view that, considering the uncertainty 
of the various seekers in finding good reasons 
coupled with the fact that the falling away in 
church attendance is very modern, the fault 
must lie with the churches themselves. 

The fact is that there is a grave fault in 
every one of the solutions already noted. With 
respect to creeds, this objection applies only 
to the quantitatively inconspicuous minority of 
persons who are at once highly intellectual and 
at the same time out of sympathy with credal 
orthodoxy. Numerically, their defection would 
hardly be noticeable. Moreover, creedless 
churches are not immune from the disease of 
empty pews. The social justice argument for 
staying away from church is about contempora- 
neous with the emergence of that doctrine into 
the modern light of day. The abandonment of 
any widespread effort by the Church at healing 
bodily sickness could be dated much nearer the 
post-apostolic age than the period of its very 



ON CHURCH-GOING 67 



modern emphasis. It is "the saints" of every 
congregation who are chiefly interested in the 
fascinating and valuable practice of personal 
purity, and these have received their quoted 
designation because they never miss a service. 
It is not "the saints" that have left the 
churches. The whole tendency in the conduct 
of church service for the past thirty or forty 
years, too, has been to make it short and 
"bright," even sometimes at the expense of 
other qualities. 

Upon examination, the 6 ' external ' ' arguments 
suffer the same fate. A Sunday morning trolley 
ride is a rarity indeed. Even in places where 
Sunday "movies" are tolerated, the perform- 
ances do not begin until afternoon. In spite of 
the laudable efforts of Mr. Henry Ford the 
proportion of the Christian population pos- 
sessed of automobiles remains relatively very 
small, while in countless instances, especially 
in the country, the automobile has made it 
possible for people at a distance to attend 
church more regularly than ever before. The 
arguments based on Ingersoll, criticism of the 
Bible, living a good life away from church, 
childhood disgust therewith, and the hypocrite 
argument are hardly worth while lingering 
over. They answer themselves, and they were 
all flourishing in the days when every respect- 
able person went to church as a matter of 
course. 

Probably those who hold that the Church 
itself is to blame for the decline in church 
attendance have the better of it, but the general 
futility and unsatisfactory nature of all the 



68 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



characteristic solutions leave much to be 
desired. One feels instinctively that they do 
not touch the root of the matter. In general 
their exponents reveal three fundamental 
misconceptions of Christianity, and they are at 
one in agreeing to ignore what is perhaps the 
most striking fact connected with the whole 
question. 

First, there is the widespread idea of those 
who have tried to explain why people have 
stopped going to church, that Christianity is 
taken up with the past at the expense of the 
present and the future. A fair sample is the 
question, based on a false antithesis, recently 
asked by a clergyman very conspicuous in 
the social service activities of New York City, 
addressing a large religious convention in New 
England: "When -the burning question of to- 
day is how to get more wages, how can you be 
satisfied with reciting creeds V Perhaps if 
there were more Church historians and corre- 
spondingly fewer enthusiasts about the "new" 
ideas which flourished in the second century 
and died (apparently) in the fourth, Chris- 
tianity would be more intelligently understood 
and less lightly contemned. Surely the lineage 
of a church has the same bearing upon the life 
of its present and future activities as the 
lineage of a horse, say, has upon its appear- 
ance, usefulness, quality and value. 

Secondly there is the curious obsession that 
orthodoxy is rather stupid and pithless. The 
prepossession in favor of heretical views 
marches with the modern revolts against 
tradition, even the best, and against definitions. 



ON CHURCH-GOING 



69 



This spirit has produced free verse, feminism, 
cubism, futurism and Protestantism. Free 
versifiers, feminists, cubists, futurists, and 
Protestants are impatient of what is orthodox. 
But curiously enough each more or less vaguely 
has produced or is producing an orthodoxy 
peculiar to itself. The logical outcome of this 
process is to defeat the end of every one of 
these movements by diffusion of force. The 
cycles from inception to lassitude vary in length. 
The force concentrated in the art, literature, 
religion, and normal domestic life of the civil- 
ized world permeated its civilization and mel- 
lowed it into the soil from which the sweet and 
kindly things of life have drawn their inspira- 
tion, and from this source, too, has been derived 
the vigor characteristic of every one of the radi- 
cal movements. 

Thus the language which the free versifiers 
seem so curiously to distort is the language 
which the sound literature of the ages has built 
up. The vigor of the old type of militant suf- 
fragette was derived from generations of an- 
cestors vigorous from the acquiescent usage of 
a system the militant suffragette did her violent 
best to destroy before she became tired. The 
whole cubist and futurist programme is nega- 
tive, a protest against the normal content of art 
produced by laborious generations of creative 
craftsmen whose work will endure for the satis- 
faction and emulation of men long after the 
mushroom art of the radicals has decayed and 
been forgotten. Protestantism falls into the 
same category, only in this case the cycle is 
longer. Queen Victoria's carriage was not 



70 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



mobbed by suffragettes, the free versifiers are 
already subsiding save for a spasmodic utter- 
ance now and then, but as recently as the year 
1917 somebody remembered the four-hundredth 
anniversary of TetzePs indulgence auction at 
Wittenberg and the inception of Luther's cru- 
sade; and pageants followed. 

The third characteristic misconception of 
Christianity springs from the confusion of 
ethics with religion. It expresses itself in a 
widely held view that people go to church to be 
good and in the curiosity contradictory parallel 
opinion that membership in a church must be 
preceded by the attainment of a certain stan- 
dard of goodness ! 

In the face of all this massed testimony to the 
superficiality of those who have tried to explain 
why people do not go to church, it is less diffi- 
cult to understand how they have, one and all, 
managed to ignore a fact which, once appre- 
hended, floods the church attendance problem 
with light. It is that Catholic Christians have 
not ceased going to church. The church-going 
question is purely a Protestant problem. 

The statement that Catholic Christians have 
not ceased going to church is not limited to the 
popular definition of ' 6 Catholics. ' ' It includes 
not only Catholics of the Roman obedience but 
the Eastern Orthodox and the Anglicans as 
well. Normal Russia is not behind Ireland as 
a church-going country, and the truth of the 
statement is strikingly illustrated by contem- 
plating the diversity in this respect between the 
Anglican schools. Anglican Catholics are con- 
vinced Catholics ; they attend church with per- 



ON CHURCH-GOING 71 



sistent regularity, while, in general, the other 
kinds of parishes suffer as badly from the 
empty pew disease as do the avowed Sectarians 
themselves^ 

To those who profess and call themselves 
Catholics, God is emphatically not a vague, leni- 
ent deity who does not care particularly what 
goes on among mankind so long as bills are paid 
and respectable lives lived. Rather, He requires 
the constant co-operation of men that His pur- 
poses for them may be effected. Catholic peo- 
ple would as soon expect God's love to operate 
in them without their intimate and constant 
co-operation, which involves steady worship in 
church, as to expect the city power station to 
boil water, toast bread, and light the cellar 
without wires and the necessary apparatus 
w T hich the householder must provide. Common 
worship, more particularly Eucharistic worship 
involving sacrifice as instituted by the Founder 
of Christianity Himself, is regarded as the very 
essence of co-operation with God. The convic- 
tion of Catholics that this kind of worship, in 
which everybody takes active part, is absolutely 
necessary, is the reason w r hy people of this per- 
suasion continue to go regularly to church. 

Lacking such worship and the conviction that 
it is vitally necessary, the Protestant lacks the 
compelling desire to go to church. Among Cath- 
olic people sermons are important for the pur- 
poses of teaching and exhorting to conversion 
and good works, but they are subordinate to 
the central corporate act of worship. Textual 
and literary criticism of the Scriptures is im- 
portant as affecting the exact meaning of the 



72 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



great book which the Church itself produced 
early in its history and which is used devotion- 
ally and to prove what the Church continues to 
teach. Creed revision or elimination is not an 
issue with Catholic people. To them the creeds 
form useful summaries of what they believe and 
frame their lives upon. They are not impa- 
tient of the limitations of exact definition. The 
object of religion to the Catholic is the ultimate 
attainment of union with God and the preserva- 
tion of this union, which is broken by sin and 
restored again by penitence, a sacramental mat- 
ter. Religion is not merely " being good," 
although this is a very important part of it. 
Eucharistic worship is a constant reminder of 
social service on a large scale. The Incarnation 
is an inspiration to justice, personal and social, 
and health goes hand in hand with the good 
morals which flow from Eucharistic worship — 
like streams from a perennial spring. Individ- 
ual purity, too, is entirely consistent with con- 
stant reminders of the purest life ever lived. 
The individual Catholic has as much, usually, 
as he can manage preserving his sense of union 
with God, without much critical attention to the 
morals and conduct of his fellow Christians. 
Catholic children notoriously do not "hate 
church.' ' Emphatically, too, the religion of 
Catholic people is not mechanical. Nothing that 
lives can rightly be called mechanical, although 
there is in true efficiency much that suggests the 
mechanical — smoothness, ease, and rhythm. In 
the worship of Catholic people, beauty seems to 
belong as of right, and art in noble fabric and 
glorious sound plays its enhancing part. 



ON CHURCH-GOING 73 



When Protestantism is compared with this 
kind of religion, and especially when the wide- 
spread laxity and indifferentism of Protestant 
people in the matter of church attendance is 
compared with the conspicuous loyalty of those 
of the various Catholic followings, the conclu- 
sion that Protestantism has nearly completed 
its cycle of activity and usefulness, seems not 
too drastic, and logically allied with the fate of 
the other radical movements with which it has 
been compared. For Protestantism is tired, it 
has burned itself out, and it is nearly spent as 
a true religious force. To-day it is very largely 
concerned with matters which would have been 
outside the thought of its many founders. The 
body of teaching in most first-rate Protestant 
theological seminaries differs widely from what 
the founders of the various denominations 
would have considered central and vital. When 
this or that denomination was founded, certain 
doctrines or one doctrine received emphasis and 
much of the teaching of the Mother Church was 
minimized or discarded ; then in course of time 
new ideas began to find room in the denomina- 
tion, reactions occurred, and new points for 
emphasis. In many cases the emphasis passed 
wholly away from doctrine, leaving the denomi- 
nation logically without excuse for existence. A 
new type of minister and a new type of layman 
grew up. In some cases the reactions were in 
the direction of alignment with abandoned us- 
age or practice, in others the reaction went the 
other way; sometimes the original emphasis 
was wholly abandoned, often new needs were 



74 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



met by the denomination by radical changes of 
polity. 

Paralleling these varied processes has been 
the crystallization of all Protestant thought into 
certain fixed principles common to the denomi- 
nations and uniformly opposed to the general 
trend of Catholic thought, tradition, and de- 
velopment. By this process, in spite of its in- 
ternal, denominational diversities, there have 
grown up in Protestantism the common ideas of 
an unornate worship; of the preponderating 
importance of the prophetical, there being no 
priestly, office; of individual liberty of scrip- 
tural interpretation ; the very modern emphasis 
on "works" so obvious in the Y. M. C. A. ideals 
and the subject matter of interdenominational 
conferences. Finally, it is unquestionable that 
from the very beginning Protestantism has 
cherished and fostered the view that the Bible 
is the final authority in all matters of doctrine, 
discipline, and worship. Such a substitution of 
a book's authority for the authority of a living 
organism, the Church, was the inevitable result 
of the radical separation germane to every na- 
tional and local reformation except the English. 

To the Catholic, therefore, however greatly 
he may love his Protestant friends and how- 
ever he may admire their attainments, worth, 
and respectability, it seems certain that Protes- 
tantism has nearly spent itself. He finds gen- 
erally in Protestantism a lack of real interest 
in the vital things of the kingdom and on all 
sides he hears the complaint: Why Do Not 
People Go To Church? He thinks he can tell 
why, too, as he looks about him and sees where 



ON CHURCH-GOING 75 



from his own point of view his Protestant 
friends and neighbors have managed to get far 
away from the norm of Christianity, whose pri- 
mal verities of worship, faith, conduct, order, 
and authority he sees efficiently exemplified in 
his own branch of the Catholic Church. If he 
happens to recall the Montanists, the Sabellians, 
the Apollinarians, and other of the early fol- 
lowings which came out of the Mother Church 
and perished, he will be inclined to believe that 
he sees history repeating itself. He begins to 
realize why people are not attracted to churches 
which have discarded the sacramental idea and 
the commissioned priesthood and the soul-satis- 
fying Eucharistic worship. He sees among 
these churches disunion and the beginnings of 
the disintegration which the fulfilling of the 
cycle involves. He investigates the faith and 
practice of his friends, and intellectual and, 
social equals, and he observes that in too many 
instances their religion is merely intellectual 
and chilly. He contemplates that large portion 
of the American middle class which is the back- 
bone of Protestantism and he finds that emo- 
tionalism has largely replaced for them much of 
the sober common sense, the bread and meat 
of the gospel, and in many quarters the com- 
monplace, deadly obsession of teetotalism re- 
placing vigorous, normal, self -restrained living, 
the ban on the dance, and the horror at cards 
bound up with neglect of the weightier matters 
of the law. He reads the circuit rider narra- 
tives of Corra Harris and compares the attitude 
revealed in them of Protestant people to their 
ministers with his own love and respect for his 



76 THE GARDEN OP THE LORD 



pastor, and then, turning to the modern min- 
ister he finds him and his modern church busily 
engaged, when at their best, in all kinds of ex- 
traneous things, forgetting that neighborhood 
entertainments and manual training and danc- 
ing classes (in the liberal denominations) and 
even successful boy-scouting have little to do 
with making God the centre of the universe and 
leading all men into union with Him. He finds 
churches pervaded with a musty chill, where the 
majesty of God is dwarfed and His splendor 
pale. He listens to the renditions of self-con- 
scious quartets, he listens to the more intellec- 
tual parsons holding forth on such subjects as 
Pragmatism in Maeterlinck, and the Color Val- 
ues in the Work of Robert Hichens; and he 
notices grape juice, and melodeons, and insup- 
erable prejudice against " Catholics. ? 7 

He sees and hears all these things, and, taking 
thought, he becomes very unhappy, but in the 
process he acquires an illuminating insight into 
the reason why people do not go to church. 



VI 



The Question of Clerical Marriage 

All religious organizations have burning 
views on the question of the marriage of their 
ministries. Among Christians of all kinds this 
is a subject of perennial interest. Protestant 
denominations in general regard the marriage 
of a minister as the ordinary condition of his 
respectability and are inclined to look askance 
upon one who has managed to keep single. The 
Eastern Orthodox must marry before ordina- 
tion. Roman Catholics, with certain exceptions, 
are not allowed to marry. Anglican clergy may 
do as they please about it. This summary in-' 
eludes all kinds of Christians, but because of 
the Roman and Eastern rulings and the Prot- 
estant, crystallized, public opinion, the real 
question — so far as it is open to discussion — is 
limited to Anglicans. 

Among Anglicans the usual discussion about 
the marriage of the clergy is often colored by 
insistence on what may be termed the Spiritual 
Argument, and is forced into the terms of 
churchmanship. But it need not be placed on 
these grounds nor so distorted and complicated, 
for overwhelmingly it is an economic and tem- 
peramental problem, chiefly economic. There 
are probably as many married clergy of the 
Catholic school of thought among Anglicans as 

77 



78 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



there are among the other types of churchmen ; 
and conversely, there are unquestionably as 
many unmarried clergy of other schools as 
among the members of the Catholic school. 
Quantitatively at least this is not a question of 
churchmanship at all. 

It is interesting to note, in this connection, 
however, that to the typically Modernist mind 
in Anglicanism, to which the personal example 
of the Man, Jesus, is paramount and human ex- 
pediency the ultimate test, the Spiritual Argu- 
ment is anathema. And yet this is curiously 
inconsistent. 

There is a group in Anglicanism which char- 
acteristically centralizes such matters as Fem- 
inism, the "Social Leadership of Jesus," the 
New Morality, the destructive type of biblical 
criticism, and social service. The lips of these 
persons frame readily the word "modern." 
They deprecate as medievalisms such matters 
as a serious Christology, penance, sacraments, 
and sacerdotalism (horrid fetich!) and who, 
having long abandoned belief in the deity of 
Jesus, have been led by their mental processes 
far in the direction opposite to the tendency in 
the Papal Church which sought to emphasize 
our Lord's divinity by the bad theology of the 
Dogma of the. Immaculate Conception. 

It is to these that the example of the Man 
Jesus can be held up with propriety, because 
from it they claim to derive their peculiar sys- 
tem. Of course according to their reasoning 
much that our Lord said must be rejected as not 
squaring with the typical bias of the Modernist; 
much that He did must be reinterpreted. But 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 79 



even the lazy Modernist who has not yet real- 
ized that eschatology is out of date and Guild 
Socialism the only panacea, must realize that 
there is one course of conduct pursued by our 
Lord which no speciously destructive criticism 
can obscure or pervert. The great Precursor 
of the Social Revolution, the person who uttered 
the Call of the Carpenter, remained unmarried ! 
To the orthodox of all Christian cults it is de- 
voutly obvious why God Incarnate did not, 
could not, marry. But to those who deny His 
identity with God, it remains at once an insol- 
uble mystery and an insurmountable stumbling- 
block that He did not. 

It is proposed to discuss briefly the problem 
of clerical marriage, in the only field where it 
is logically open for discussion — the Anglican 
Communion — from the point of view of the 
question: What is the mind of the Church in „ 
this question of clerical marriage? 

It may be asserted summarily that on 
grounds of barest efficiency a Church in which 
most of the clergy are married is thereby ipso 
facto debarred from doing its best work; be- 
cause of the nature of that work; because the 
married priest cannot live easily with slum- 
dwellers at home or in the mission field as he 
should to reach them; because he and his wife 
cannot live anywhere on the stipend which 
would be just enough for him alone ; because he 
cannot give to his children educational and 
other opportunities such as they are normally 
entitled to ; because, in general, he is inhibited 
from giving his entire energy to his priestly 
work when he is obliged of necessity to devote a 



80 



THE GARDEN OP THE LORD 



great deal of it to his wife and his own family 
affairs. 

What is here called the Spiritual Argument, 
if considered at all, also tells against clerical 
marriage. Those who hold that for spiritual 
reasons a priest should not marry understand 
that he is wedded to his sacred office, the cause 
of Christ Whose servant he is, and Whom he is 
constrained, in this respect, to imitate. It 
w r ould appear that this whole argument is 
spoiled by its inconsistency. For if Christ's 
servant should refrain from marriage because 
He was not married, he should refrain from liv- 
ing in a rectory or clergy house because He had 
not where to lay His head; he should exercise 
either a peripatetic ministry, which would inter- 
fere with the whole system of Church organiza- 
tion, or else he would be constrained to rely 
upon the hospitality of his parishioners. It 
seems strained. 

There are not lacking, however, among the 
protagonists of this argument even the extreme 
views that marriage, in the case of a priest, is 
a violation of the spirit of ordination vows, and 
that marriage is morally wrong. Historically 
the claim is made that the whole Catholic 
Church discountenances the marriage of priests 
the modern exceptions being the Anglicans since 
the Reformation, and the Uniats. It is held 
that the custom of the Eastern Church cannot 
be cited against this claim because the marriage 
of its clergy takes place before ordination, and 
a priest-widower may not remarry. It is con- 
ceded that an Anglican priest possesses the 
right to marry which was specifically secured 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 81 



for hitii at the Reformation Settlement, but it 
is thought that he should not take advantage of 
that right. Even if it be pointed out that St. 
Peter himself had a wife, as witness Holy Writ, 
it is made clear that he had her before he be- 
came an Apostle and well before the Christian 
ministry was inaugurated and its principles de- 
fined. No objection is made to a man already 
married seeking Holy Orders. 

Having cleared the ground as much as 
possible, we come to the practical side of the 
question. Here we would plead that no clergy- 
man or prospective clergyman and no woman 
ought, in fairness to the Church and to them- 
selves, to consider getting married to each other 
without grave consideration of the responsibili- 
ties peculiar to the state they contemplate. The 
considerations which do occur to the clergy, 
and their prospective spouses are often wide, 
of the mark. Mr. Newbury Frost Read, in the 
American Church Monthly for May, 1918, 
estimated that the average gross income of the 
clergy of the Protestant Episcopal Church from 
ecclesiastical sources of all kinds was $974.60 
per annum. It ought clearly to be understood 
beforehand that marriage, on merely economic 
grounds and apart from the personalities 
involved, frequently presages the vitiation of 
the clergyman's highest usefulness to the 
Church and the subjection of a gentlewoman 
to drudgery. In spite of such instances of the 
abuse of clerical celibacy of the enforced variety 
as may be brought forward per contra, it is fair 
to ask if the unquestionable efficiency of the 
Church of the Papal Obedience is not very 



82 THE G ARDEN OF THE LORD 



largely due to the concentration of its officials 
upon their specific work, and their entire free- 
dom from domestic preoccupations such as are 
inevitable in the life en famille. 

In the matter of temperament mingled with 
household economics, it might be very interest- 
ing to subjoin a few examples taken from 
acquaintance and actual observation. Unfor- 
tunately this cannot be done. The present 
writer is a human being and weak and refuses 
to sacrifice his peace of mind for the rest of 
his life in this world for the excellent purpose 
of illustrating what he desires to convey to his 
readers out of his experience in contact with a 
host of married clergy and their wives and 
families. For among these he numbers many 
of his best and most valued friends. Therefore 
purely hypothetical cases will have to serve in 
lieu of ' ' true stories/' but they are presented 
in the reasonably confident hope that these 
thumbnail sketches are true enough to life to be 
at once recognized as fair examples. 

So, then, we will begin with Smith, a godly 
and learned parson who has been rector of a 
w T ell-to-do parish in a conservative New Eng- 
land town for the past thirty years. He 
receives $2500, annually, though he must not 
be thought of as having enjoyed such an income 
all through his pastorate there. His wife is 
a splendid person with every imaginable good 
quality including that of being a good mother. 
Between her and Smith there is established an 
ideal companionship. She knows the parish 
better than anyone else and the parish approves 
of her. She is a parochial necessity to Smith. 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 83 



If she should die, he would be all 1 at sea in his 
work, and the parish never could replace her. 
Smith has an enormous area to cover, extending 
for several miles in every direction from the 
"Center" where the Church property is 
located. For many years he has seen that 
extension work should be undertaken, but it 
could not be done without a curate. He cannot 
afford even a small motor because his children 
(and they are dears) John and Margaret, 
Sallie, Edward, and Edith, have kept him busy 
scraping and grinding for many years. 

If Smith had not married when he came to 
that parish thirty years ago he would have 
missed a great deal of domestic joy, but by 
being immersed in family cares he has found it 
impossible to know^ that other and perhaps 
deeper joy of a worthy task adequately fulfilled. 
Of course the loss to the parish, in thirty years * 
of incessant preoccupations with the family 
which have absorbed the bulk of its rector's 
time and energy, is simply incalculable. If he 
had remained unmarried, and missed what he 
could never have realized in the matters of 
domestic life, he could have had that curate long 
ago; he could have studied more, that is, ade- 
quately. On his salary, two priests, even three at 
a pinch, could have been accommodated in the 
rectory, and they could have lived better than 
the seven members of his family have ever 
been able to live. It costs much less to keep 
three men than seven persons, five of them 
with the variations of growing appetites to say 
nothing of schooling and shoe leather. And 
with the many more people who might have 



84 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



been brought to know and love God and to 
active Church membership, it is highly probable 
that more funds could have been raised. It is 
also fair to use the imagination upon how much 
more efficient Smith might have become if he 
had been obliged to do his pastoral work him- 
self instead of leaving a great deal of it to his 
splendid, self -immolating wife. There are also 
many lines in Smith's kindly, fifty-five year old 
visage which were not put there by the anxieties 
of his parochial cure, and we need not blame 
Smith if he asserts mentally, as he looks fondly 
at his sweet wife's lined face and his five robust 
progeny, that he would not change places with 
his classmate Robinson, who remained unmar- 
ried, though a year older, and has built up an 
enormous work in a Southern Missionary Dis- 
trict and is about to be made a bishop ! 

There is Jones and his wife. Mrs. Jones re- 
tains her attractive appearance, but she has 
never been strong, and several years ago Jones 
gave up the ministry so that as a bond salesman 
he might earn enough to pay her doctor 's bills, 
live, and gradually reduce his debts. 

Jenkins, situated likewise, sticks to the work 
of the ministry for which he was solemnly or- 
dained, although some of his wife's relatives 
consider him rather heartless for doing so. He 
is heavily in debt, and he does his poor, discour- 
aged best to keep up and not let his parish slip 
through his fingers. Mr. Bings, the local banker 
and his senior warden, rules the parish with a 
rod of iron, and would like to have a younger 
man who would do more with the young people 
and preach snappier sermons, as he calls them. 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 85 



J enkins is tied hand and foot because Mr. Bings 
holds the purse-strings in that parish and he 
could not go elsewhere even if he were invited, 
because Mattie thinks she does well in the Wil- 
kinston climate and would not hear of moving 
to another parish. It is obvious enough why 
certain laymen with the Bings disposition pre- 
fer married rectors. 

Tubbs' wife is of another sort. She has al- 
ways been very well indeed. She is full of en- 
ergy and is a very superior person. The mem- 
bers of the Ladies' Society are a little inclined 
to resent this but that does not trouble Mrs. 
Tubbs in the slightest degree. There is no one, 
really, for her to associate with in Pencilville 
anyway, and she cannot understand why Gerald 
should pay so much attention to the people who 
are always in his mind. Mrs. Tubbs, capable 
person, is, in fact, a Lady Rector. She knows a 
great deal more than Tubbs about everything, 
and whether she is liked or not by the parish- 
ioners is a matter supremely indifferent to her ; 
so she says, and it must be true. Although she 
talks a great deal and sometimes gets "Mr. 
Tubbs, " as she calls him, into tight places, he 
is very devoted to her and admires her strength 
of mind. In fact, Tubbs came close to severing 
a friendship of many years' standing not long 
ago when a visiting clergyman told the story 
of the bishop's wife who wrote to one of her 
clergy: "We do not ordinarily confirm in Au- 
gust"; and Mrs. Tubbs spoke what was in her 
mind and said she would not have that man 
in her house another time. 

Gibbs, a born cracker-barrel philosopher, was 



86 THE GABDEN OF THE LORD 



doing really wonderful work in the Middle West 
and was accounted the most effective man in 
the strategic Missionary District where his 
capabilities had full scope. But Mrs. Gibbs was 
bent upon coming East, and did so at the first 
opportunity, bringing Gibbs with her. And now 
Gibbs, rector of a small " fashionable parish, 
may be seen any day swinging along the well- 
kept roads of his suburban cure, dodging auto- 
mobiles, and stretching his legs as he calls it 
in that smug countryside. Gibbs is tongue-tied 
in the presence of his smart vestrymen whose 
cocktails and cigarettes and country club he 
heartily despises. And while Mrs. Gibbs, happy 
in her intimacy with the somewhat overdressed 
wives of these small stock brokers, flits like a 
pleasant butterfly from tea to dinner, and from 
dinner to dance at the club, Gibbs, gnawing his 
weather-hardened lip, ruminates in his slovenly 
study over his old buckboard and his seven 
mission stations in Wiscota, and the almost 
imperceptible, reminiscent odor of roasting 
prairie chickens. 

Mrs. Nobbs, too, has the social bee buzzing 
steadily under her becoming toque. (Even a 
serious writer may keep abreast of current 
nomenclature in millinery.) She did not find it 
necessary to take the long step from West to 
East, like Mrs. Gibbs, to land her in an environ- 
ment where she would be properly appreciated. 
Mrs. Nobbs lived all her own adolescent life in 
the suburbs. Her particular desire was to get 
permanently into the great city, tantalizingly 
familiar through occasional theatre and supper 
parties cut short too oft by the necessity of 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 



87 



catching the last train to the paternal villa at 
Bumblewood. Now, married to Nobbs, curate 
in a great metropolitan parish, she has daily 
access to these cates and mummeries, and Nobbs 
wonders if he can possibly keep the apartment 
going next year on the same salary which made 
many a substantial gift to Eleanor possible in 
the days before his marriage, when he was 
ensconced in the commodious clergy house at 
St. Enurchus'. 

Leaving the temperamental side of our dis- 
cussion, and delving into the economic aspects 
of clerical marriage, we discover that one sali- 
ent fact stands clear. This is that whatever 
may have been the mind of the Church at the 
time her clergy were first allowed to marry or 
remain single as they saw fit, there can be little 
question (when one looks below the surface) 
as to her present attitude. Overwhelming evi : 
dence that it is unfavorable is found when one 
examines the statistics of clerical support. It is 
perfectly obvious that the salaries provided for 
clergymen are large enough, taking an average, 
to live on with reasonable comfort, with all the 
necessities and some of the desirabilities of 
life — as single men. And $974.60 per year, es- 
pecially in these days, is not enough to support 
a family in the way a clergyman is expected to 
live; even though the clergy reverted to the 
charming XVIII century custom of taking wives 
from the classes habituated to household labor 
and accustomed to a relative privation, as were 
those who sat below the salt and whom the 
parson married when the squire commanded — 
a fine old custom with much to commend it to 



88 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



penniless seminarians with designs on young 
gentlewomen without private incomes. 

The exceptionally large clerical salaries are 
very small when compared with the financial 
rewards of the various non-clerical professions 
and the kind of work done by those socially 
and educationally the equals of the reverend 
clergy. And these, such as they are, are rather 
strictly confined — there are a very few, sporadic 
exceptions — to great parishes not usually in the 
pastoral charge of clergy of the ordinary mar- 
rying age. Moreover, there can be little ques- 
tion as to the relative effectiveness parochially 
of, say, five unmarried clergy living together in 
a clergy house, and two married clergy living 
in separate establishments. The cost for each 
combination w r ould be about the same. 

Therefore, the laity being, of course, pos- 
sessed of common sense, both the clergyman 
and the lady with whom he is engaged in a mat- 
rimonial conspiracy have this dilemma to face 
when they contemplate getting married: are 
the laity merely stingy; or, is it the "mind of 
the Church" that its financial support is in- 
tended for the needs of unmarried clergy? 
Either there is a well-nigh universal conspiracy 
to starve out the clergy and their families — 
which is patently absurd — or the facts compel 
the admission that the Church does not want 
her clergy to be married or she would provide 
support for their families and take chances on 
getting Lady Rectors and Di-Rectors mixed in 
with the charming ladies who usually preside 
over rectorial and curatial dinners, lunches and 
breakfasts. 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 89 



The writer is not unmindful of the Blind 
God, or, if a Christian designation be preferred, 
of that which St. Paul intimates rhapsodically 
to be greater than the mighty virtues of faith 
and hope. True love transcends material con- 
siderations, is independent of reason, and ele- 
vates the lives it touches with its caress to 
planes suffused with a glory as of perennial 
sunrise. And yet — it is peculiarly irritating to 
contemplate the spectacle of an engaged semi- 
narian who, having kept the faith, comes near 
the end of his course, and dickers wildly for a 
job that will support a wife! One feels that 
those boys lack discipline. When St. Paul said, 
"Let the deacon be the husband of one wife," 
he meant one wife. He desired that the clergy 
should never take advantage of the legal oppor- 
tunity to be polygamous in an oriental environ- 
ment where such procedure was rather freely 
countenanced. 

Propinquity and the will-to-love are the fac- 
tors which lead up to a marriage. Both can be 
controlled, as being in a given place and any 
ordinary state of mind may be, rather easily, 
controlled. Intending Benedicks and young 
(and all) ladies who aspire to preside over 
rectory tables and nurseries might well ask 
themselves pertinent questions like these: Is 
it fair for me to subject the woman I want to 
marry to what is in store for her? Is it wise 
for me to risk diminishing the pastoral effec- 
tiveness of the man I want to marry? 

The point of view which must have emerged 
as being held by the writer is sometimes thought 
of as a selfish one. But really it is not. It 



90 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



should be thought of, rather, as one of sacrifice. 
It is self-sacrifice not for a profession but for 
a cause. One balances the cause against what 
one desires as a private individual — in this case, 
marriage. It is, of course, by the principle of 
sacrifice applied, that great steeps are sur- 
mounted, great obstacles overcome, great works 
accomplished. Sacrifice involves mysterious 
compensations, and these leaven a worthy life 
lived for a great cause. Thus, by putting away 
pride, a workable humility is attained ; by cast- 
ing off reposeful ease, the hard effectiveness of 
mind and soul and body are gained; by the 
deliberate sacrifice of domestic joy in the mari- 
tal state, the ends of God are often best served. 

These considerations are presented because, 
although they are related to a vital, indeed, a 
burning question, they are rarely discussed. 
And they ought to be discussed. It ought to be 
clear enough that while a clergyman is morally 
as well as canonically free to marry, too many 
clergy marry as a matter almost of routine. In 
particular the apparent feeling among many 
preparing for the ministry that ordination and 
marriage normally go hand in hand is on its 
merits to be deprecated. Very many married 
clergymen would have been more profitable 
servants if they had been willing to sacrifice 
domestic life and give themselves unreservedly 
to the work of their vocation, exercising deliber- 
ately the principle of self-sacrifice in view of 
the fact that ordination does not expunge the 
qualities of manhood, and that marriage is the 
normal life for a normal man. It is certain 
that the laity as a whole are not stingy in the 



CLERICAL MARRIAGE 91 



matter of clerical support, as evidenced by their 
enormous subscription of some eight million 
dollars to the Church Pension Fund, but one is 
forced to the conclusion that the standard of 
clerical support abundantly confirms the con- 
tention that the Church as a whole does not 
desire a married clergy. 

Public utterance on this subject is usually 
avoided for the obvious reason that few care 
to risk getting themselves disliked. When the 
"anti" side is presented it is usually by one 
of that inconspicuously tiny minority in the 
Church which holds to the Spiritual Argument, 
and whose contentions are regarded as the ful- 
minations of medievalists, hence negligible. 
More has been written and spoken on the other 
side. Many times, for example, it has been 
alleged, and taken for granted, too, that the 
Church would have been better off and the 
course of human progress advanced if the West- 
ern clergy had been enabled through many gen- 
erations to bequeath offspring to the Church 
and the world, to inherit their carefully segre- 
gated culture, and hand on their worthy tradi- 
tion. But this quite gratuitously assumes that 
the early and mediaeval priesthood would have 
possessed, as men of family, the great tradition 
and carefully nurtured gifts which were the 
very fruit of that self-sacrifice which kept them 
unmarried ; the great tradition and gifts which 
blossomed forth in the lives and influence of the 
pastors, saints, and doctors of the past. It also 
overlooks the great army of spiritual progeny 
begotten by those who devoted their entire en- 
ergies to the service of God. Also it ignores 



92 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



atavism, which may account for the proverbial 
"cussedness" of minister's sons! 

The writer is also inclined strongly to agree 
with those who believe that the women are 
the chief sufferers in clerical marriages. Cer- 
tainly if selfishness is to be spoken of at all, 
it is extremely selfish for a young clergyman 
without material prospects other than the very 
moderate financial expectations germane to his 
vocation to ask a young woman with character 
to share with him certain poverty and a sordid 
struggle, thereby estopping her from an alli- 
ance with some layman who could enable her 
to live her life in normal surroundings. 

If both parties to a matrimonial engagement, 
clearly understanding what is in store for them" 
are utterly willing to make this kind of sacrifice 
and equally unwilling to make the other kind, 
perhaps the only consideration which can be 
presented to them is the hope that in fulfilling 
their own wishes they may not too greatly hin- 
der a cause of infinitely greater importance 
than their own personal happiness in each other 
— the cause of Him Who subordinated all else 
to the task of saving humanity, and Who per- 
sisted until He met His death upon that cross 
which has become the symbol of the highest 
self-sacrifice. 



VII 

Ceremonial in the Anglican Revival 

There is no lack of persons who deprecate 
altogether any discussion of ceremonial, seeing 
therein nothing but a waste of time. But if 
the Holy Scriptures are in any sense the word 
of God, such a view must be wrong, because 
much of the text of Holy Scripture is devoted 
to ceremonial directions. Moreover, mankind's 
estimate of its importance may be discovered 
in any lodge room or at any civilized dinner 
table. Everyone capable of self-expression is a 
ceremonialist of one kind or another, from the^ 
bushman standing motionless on one leg to the' 
Caucasian gentleman who removes his hat when 
he meets a woman he knows in a public place. 
It is only when religious ceremonial is in ques- 
tion that there ever seems to be any question 
about the matter whatever; and perhaps the 
most curious bit of psychology connected with 
the question is found in the fact that those who 
most loudly aver that it is of no importance, 
anyhow, are the very same who throw them- 
selves most vigorously into any campaign 
against it. 

It is a commonplace of recent history that 
the leaders of the Oxford Movement placed no 
emphasis whatever on the outward and visible. 
They laid afresh the foundations of most that 

93 



94 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



is soundest in Anglicanism to-day, but they for- 
bore to cultivate the art of public worship, and 
these leaders have always had, and still have, 
a following which was and is in accord with 
their teaching, but which was and is so conserv- 
ative as to be chary of allowing their doctrinal 
catholicity to show in any overt act. This ultra- 
conservative churchmanship is likely to be 
scholarly, but the results of its scholarship seem 
never to have advanced beyond the academic 
stage; while at its worst, it is a kind of book- 
case religion which has little effect upon the lay 
people who happen to live under its aegis. It 
appears to be a kind of complacent, intellectual 
position, strongly held, but rarely or never 
used. 

The effort to get into general acceptance and 
practice the principles of the Book of Common 
Prayer which were forced into recognition by 
the Oxford Movement is one well worth making. 
These principles as well as the principle of uni- 
formity of practice have received great empha- 
sis from the war. Acceptance has been secured 
for auricular confession, reservation of the 
Blessed Sacrament, and prayers for the dead 
among Churchmen of various stripes and 
schools who had been previously aligned against 
these practices in the bitter controversies which 
only yesterday raged about them. The need for 
such practices is not confined to the American 
and British Churchmen who carried on the war 
as members of the military and naval forces of 
their countries ; it is being increasingly felt by 
the whole Anglican Communion. Therefore, 



CEREMONIAL 



95 



the ground is happily shifting away from acad- 
emic discussion and written controversy. 

There is apparent a strong desire, as yet in 
great part unexpressed outwardly, among an 
ever-increasing number of the Church's people 
that the Catholic truth, so long obscured, should 
be brought to light and translated out of acad- 
emic expression into parochial practice. It is 
felt by many who have never been taught the 
whole truth that the whole truth should be pre- 
sented to all. They think that it will, if given 
the opportunity, fill the hearts and meet the 
urgent needs of people who are really weary 
of the negative and partial systems to which 
they have of necessity become habituated, but 
of which they are far from enamoured. The 
mere use of the phrase, "our incomparable 
liturgy," no longer thrills the average Angli- 
can; if he is to get a thrill, he must be allowed' 
to see the wonders of that incomparable liturgy 
and to take his awed part in its highest and 
loveliest expression. 

The negative and partial systems have sur- 
vived at all only because of inertia, or because 
of the deadly power of that tradition which 
holds that change, any change, might offend 
someone. That change for the better, even if 
necessary without regard to anyone's private 
prejudices or preferences, might be pleasing to 
God, is an opinion which has been very slow in 
laying hold upon many leaders in the Anglican 
Communion. The obvious catholicity of the 
Book of Common Prayer greatly needs popu- 
larization, and to effect this, a certain uniform- 
ity of practice in public worship is clearly the 



96 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



first essential. The widespread neglect of the 
art of ecclesiastical ceremonial is the chief con- 
tributory factor to the present condition of the 
Anglican Communion in this respect, because 
it is through the ceremonies of the Church that 
the Church expresses her liturgical mind. 

Many dissatisfied Churchmen, having studied 
somewhat the Church's position, and realizing 
the insufficiency or the destructiveness of the 
churchmanship to which they have been sub- 
jected, make the considerable temperamental 
leap required and become members of the near- 
est available parish of the "advanced" type. 
Others , who realize the inadequacy of the 
churchly system in which they have been nur- 
tured are deterred from making such a change 
for family or other similar sentimental reasons, 
but when one puts himself into the place of 
these, it is easily seen why such good people 
remain where they are, parochially, despite 
their dissatisfaction: It is because they are 
convinced that the other kind of parish has 
about it something Roman! The tales of Ro- 
man Catholics who have gone ignorantly into 
"High- Anglican" Churches and not known the 
difference, laughable as they appear, have, nev- 
ertheless, their substantial foundation in fact. 
This is entirely because of outward appear- 
ances. What is most obvious is how the divine 
liturgy is celebrated, the altar arranged, and 
things done in general. 

When the generation which followed the orig- 
inal Oxford reformers began to build Churches 
— such as Mr. Hubbard's princely gift to God 
of St. Alban's, Holborn — and to put into prac- 



CEREMONIAL 



97 



tice the doctrines of the movement, there were 
few sources available from which they could 
have derived the ceremonial through which to 
express that teaching. It was felt that there 
was nothing else to do but to approximate the 
usage of the Church of Rome, adapting this to 
the liturgy as set forth in the Book of Common 
prayer. Humanly, it is easily understood why 
there was a storm of protest. Even the un- 
speakable Kensit is explicable when we remem- 
ber the shock which this 4 ' Romanizing ' ' caused 
to be felt throughout Anglican circles, insignifi- 
cant as were the detailed practices so adopted. 
The one source from which the "Puseyites" — 
as Machonochie and the other members of this 
group were, most irrationally, named — could 
have derived a fairly pure Anglican usage was 
the Coronation Service ; but there was no coro- 
nation until many years later, when Queen, 
Victoria's death brought Edward VII to the 
throne ; and presumably it was never thought 
of in this connection. 

In the United States, the Roman Catholic 
"Baltimore Directory" and later the "Ritual 
Notes," published in England, formed the chief 
sources for the ceremonial inaugurated by the 
followers of the Oxford reformers, until "The 
Ceremonies of the Mass" by McGarvey and 
Burnett made its appearance in 1905. The 
authors, both first-rate liturgical scholars, made 
their researches among the works of the fore- 
most liturgiologists. They worked out in detail 
the application of the best and soundest known 
ceremonial, in principle and practice, to the 
Communion Office of the American Book of 



98 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



Common Prayer, producing a scholarly hand- 
book of directions. This book, published under 
the auspices of the Clerical Union for the Main- 
tenance and Defense of Catholic Principles, put 
a stamp of quasi-official approval upon a type 
of ceremonial which was much like the modern 
Roman ceremonial as codified under Piux IX, 
because worked out from the same sound 
sources; and it has done much, without any 
question, to crystallize this usage in the Ameri- 
can Church. 

Now it is a fact that apart from the causes, 
or from the psychology involved, there is among 
people not of the Papal obedience a very wide- 
spread and deep-seated dislike for, and preju- 
dice against, the Roman Church. This dislike, 
founded in certain well-known reasons, is, like 
most similar conditions of mind, unreasoning, 
and is very likely to be stupid, and stupidly 
expressed. Because both Pius IX and the for- 
mulators of the accepted ceremonial usage had 
access to the same sources, the ceremonies 
evolved naturally and inevitably have much in 
common; and because of this fact, the stupidity 
just referred to was unable to discriminate be- 
tween sound ceremonial usage as such, and the 
fact of the similarity. Much suspicion and dis- 
like was fostered by this lack of discrimination 
on the part of the critics, whose proudest boast 
was to the effect that they did not understand 
ceremonial and did not want to understand it! 
It is as though a large portion of the American 
people should object to the United States mili- 
tary and naval forces wearing uniforms, be- 
cause the German forces are accustomed to 



CEEEMONIAL 



99 



wear very similar uniforms. Adverse critics 
of Anglican revival and self-expression have 
found common ground for their attacks in this 
accident of similarity, and the observer may 
readily perceive how in this matter a common 
ground of ignorance and stupidity makes, like 
politics, strange bedfellows. Thus, Eonian 
Catholics habitually scoff at what they say we 
have "stolen" from them; sectarian people are 
supplied with a never-failing fund of material 
for drastic criticism ; 6 6 Modernists ' 9 sneer ; 
"Evangelicals" hold up pious hands in horror; 
and "Connecticut Churchmen' 9 are certain that 
the atmosphere of the "advanced" parish is 
much too rarefied for them! 

Although the first edition of The Eev. Percy 
Dearmer's "Parson's Handbook" appeared in 
April, 1 899, it was some years before it became 
very well known in the United States. Even, 
now it is not widely known. Anglicans who 
realize the very great importance of sound cere- 
monial are pretty thoroughly committed to the 
standardized type, and even though the Dear- 
mer ceremonies had been of such nature as to 
appeal to them, these were not known in 
America until well after the McGarvey and 
Burnett ceremonies had taken a firm hold on 
the practice of the "advanced" parishes. Prob- 
ably no advocate of Dr. Dearmer's system 
would attempt or even wish to have it replace 
the ceremonies now generally in use, which the 
Anglican Communion has an unquestionable 
right to use, and for which right many saintly 
men have endured bitter persecution. 

But there is, on the other hand, something 



100 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



to be said about the common attitude towards 
the book in which the classical Anglican cere- 
monies are set forth by Dr. Dearmer. This is 
usually dismissed by its many critics as the 
work of a clever scholar which is ruined and 
rendered academic and impracticable by the 
author's pronounced archaeological obsession. 
But even one holding such a view must admit 
two things, viz. : that Dr. Dearmer has put for- 
ever beyond question the legitimacy of Angli- 
cans in their services making use of every 
requisite of Catholic ceremonial ; and that on 
grounds drastically conservative, Anglican, and 
even anti-Roman. There can never again be 
any serious question, on the part of any person 
capable of understanding a finished demonstra- 
tion, about the facts of Anglican ceremonial, 
because Dr. Dearmer has set them out from 
exclusively Anglican sources. And except for 
differences in petto (e. g., the method of swing- 
ing a censer, and similar matters), this classical 
Anglican ceremonial is, in every salient partic- 
ular, concerned with the same ornaments and 
the same actions, and the same materials used 
in connection with the ceremonial of the "ad- 
vanced" parishes. The differences are alto- 
gether differences in details ; the legitimacy of 
using lights, incense, and all the other "points' 9 
of ceremonial in an Anglican Church is demon- 
strated. 

The second point is this: that Dr. Dearmer 
has supplied, through recourse to archaeology 
(though not having to go back very far as an 
archaeologist would count the time), a system so 
almost aggressively "Anglican" that logically 



CEREMONIAL 



101 



it should appeal to all those who dislike the 
ceremonial in current use (because it seems to 
them "Roman"). Many of these desire im- 
provement in ceremonial matters because they 
have realized how very destructive and un- 
worthy is the prevalent carelessness in such 
matters outside the field covered by the " ad- 
vanced" parishes. In "moderate" and "low" 
parishes, it is submitted, Dr. Dearmer's cere- 
monial, if adopted, and adapted, would consti- 
tute a really enormous improvement over the 
long-settled state of muddle about public wor- 
ship which prevails in these parishes, wherein 
ceremonial has not been eliminated, but rather 
mixed up, wrongly emphasized, and execrably 
performed. Dr. Dearmer's recourse to archae- 
ology is, of course, a necessity, as in the case 
of anyone who would re-state and codify the 
Anglican pre-Reformation customs and prac- 
tices. He resorts to it, perforce, in his desire 
to conserve and revive a liturgical heritage 
which had long been obscured by the degenerate 
type of services which the XVIII Century 
brought to their high point of meretriciousness 
and which the "safe" parishes have kept em- 
balmed. Dr. Dearmer has painstakingly ex- 
amined the various sources and authorities on 
the Anglican Rite. He makes his chief appeal 
not primarily in the matter of ceremonial (which 
is really incidental to his purpose) but against 
the muddle of that degenerate Churchmanship 
just referred to, which has starved the souls 
of its adherents this long time into a state of 
negative respectability. His outstanding pleas 
are in favor of the reunion of the Church with 



102 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



art, the sweeping away of cobwebs, the empha- 
sizing of salient things, and the restoration and 
renewal of spiritual living. 

The kind of services commended by Dr. Dear - 
mer to the Church are simple, reverent and dig- 
inified. Their use would provide much aid to 
worship, and should do much to destroy the 
killing tediousness of the cut and dried "Morn- 
ing Service' 9 in backward parishes. It wholly 
replaces with a cogent scheme the liturgical 
improprieties which have persisted to absurdity 
in all too many places. It is an elastic, homo- 
geneous, and complete system intended for 
practical use; and it is armed at every point 
against the sneers of our Roman brethren and 
the persistent state of disturbance among cer- 
tain of our own people based on the supposition 
that Anglicans, other than the "Morning 
Prayer" kind, are on the high road to Rome! 

The people who need such a system of wor- 
ship and parochial conduct the most, do not, in 
general, know anything about it. It deserves 
popularization by study and experiment. 

There remain two points, one of particular, 
the second of general bearing in the ceremonial 
question, which need clearing up. The first is 
that the Dearmer system of ecclesiastical effi- 
ciency is too elaborate for practical use. This 
is an erroneous view. It rests upon the fact 
that Dr. Dearmer has collected and made avail- 
able so vast an amount of material that it could 
not, possibly, be used all together at one time 
and in one place. But Dr. Dearmer points this 
out himself in the introduction to "The Par- 
son's Handbook." He mentions the wealth of 



CEREMONIAL 103 



material, and speaks clearly about how to use 
from it what is needed in any particular place. 

The second point concerns the common mis- 
understanding of what is meant by the term: 
"Western Use." In its large sense, this ex- 
pression may be taken to mean the general line 
of development taken in the ecclesiastical West, 
and as distinct from "Eastern Use." In this 
sense, the term "Western Use" would include 
all the various ceremonial uses of the West, and 
vary internally in point of periodic develop- 
ment, as well as in the details of the various 
minor differences national and otherwise ; and, 
in this light, "Dearmerism" would be a " West- 
ern Use ' ' equally Avith the strict Modern Roman 
use, and the use in general practice among 
"High Church Anglicans." But in its stricter 
meaning, the term has an entirely different con- 
notation. Too often it is spoken of as though, 
there were only one "Western Use" and that 
the Modern Roman. There are, of course, at 
least two "Western Uses" in this sense of the 
term, one being the use of the Anglican Book 
of Common Prayer. But it should be under- 
stood that not only is the term "Western Use" 
incorrectly used as an euphemistic synonym for 
the Modern Roman, but that there* are numer- 
ous other Roman uses besides the one that 
those who favor this term have in mind. In 
fact, in order to witness what is commonly 
meant by "Western Use" in the Roman Cath- 
olic Communion itself, one must go to the 
Churches of the Jesuits, Reclemptorists, or Ora- 
torians; to certain of the newer Churches in 
France; to parish Churches in Rome and cer- 



104 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



tain other towns and cities in Italy, Germany 
and Austria, or to the Churches in England and 
the United States. Even within the compara- 
tively narrow field of the strictly modern, official 
usage of the Roman Church, there will be found 
two distinct kinds of ceremonial: that of the 
popular types of Churches just indicated; and 
the more restrained usage of the greater Ro- 
man basilican Churches.* 

Then, besides the strictly modern Roman 
Rite, and in addition to the Book of Common 
Prayer, there are in current use in the West 
several other rites, and these not the least cor- 
rect and desirable on their intrinsic merits. 
Thus, throughout the great Archdiocese of Mi- 
lan, and even beyond its borders, the ancient 
Ambrosian Rite serves more than a million 
souls. In the great diocese of Lyons, the Lyons 
Rite continues to be used. In certain places in 
Spain the Mozarabic Rite is still current. In 
Portugal (on hearsay) the Rite of Braga is still 
used. The older orders, Carthusian, Domini- 
can, and Cistercian, all use their proper rites. 
There remain, then, not only the various cere- 
monial systems which accompany these rites, 
but there are more than these in the heart of 
the Papal obedience. In Spain, despite the 
modernized text of the service books, the old 
Spanish ceremonial remains in use to so wide 
an extent as to justify the guess that it is some- 
what better known and more familiar to clergy 
and people than the official Modern Roman use. 



* Via., e. g., Modern Western Use, F. C. Eeles, in Alcuin 
Club Collections, No. XIX, p. 25.— A. R. Mowbray & Co. 



CEREMONIAL 



105 



This Spanish ceremonial, like that accompany- 
ing the Dominican, Carthusian, and Amobro- 
sian Rites, is curiously like the classical Angli- 
can Use as set forth by Dr. Dearmer. Two 
women, one a Swedish Lutheran, the other a 
Czecho-Slovakian Roman Catholic, once told 
the writer, without collusion, and within a week 
of each other, that the services conducted in a 
"Dearmerite" parish in the United States so 
closely approximated their own services as to 
be almost indistinguishable from them to the 
worshipper. 

Local uses also remain in Venice, in parts of 
Germany and Austria, in a number of French 
Churches, and in Belguim. These are all "liv- 
ing' ' uses, and it may be said that an under- 
standing of the diversities of usage under the 
Papal obedience, which the survival and even 
the popularity of these various uses clearly in* 
dicate, ought to do something towards dissi- 
pating the intellectual mirage of Roman uni- 
formity which has deceived so many dissatisfied 
Anglicans. 

Such, a view of modern Roman practice in the 
conduct of public worship might also do another 
thing. It might, when made in its proper set- 
ting — in a parish Church wherein is revealed 
the craftsmanship of the machine embroiderer, 
the tinsmith, the housepainter, and the artful 
worker in plaster images — also do something 
towards demonstrating how much better Angli- 
cans manage such things than Romans, at least 
in this country. The "High Anglican' ' Church 
is the school, par excellence, for the artistically 
aspiring Roman Master of Ceremonies, who un- 



106 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



doubtedly goes away from an Anglican High 
Mass in despair, greatly edified! 

Vv 7 ith respect to what has been alluded to as 
the strictly Modern Roman, official usage, which 
is due to Pius IX, this much may be said : Pius 
IX was a person of isms, and his chief ism was 
ultramontanism. His panacea was the institu- 
tion of a rigid, external uniformity in the 
Churches which acknowledged his sway. It was 
the application of this panacea which introduced 
to the Roman Catholic world the enforcement 
of the modern, official, Roman usage. Pius IX 
had a powerful grip upon the Church in France. 
He was able to impose his will in this matter 
upon certain Churches and orders, but unable 
to force the hand of those above noted as still 
carrying on their traditional rites and the cere- 
monial proper to these. In France he managed 
to destroy the diocesan uses, almost entirely, 
and the French Church has been neither health- 
ier nor happier since. The theological learn- 
ing of this Church is no longer pre-eminent 
and of world-wide renown. Individuality has 
been crowded out of the French Church, and 
the irrepressible national feeling of the people, 
turned out of its normal ecclesiastical channel 
for self-expression, found an outlet in the bitter 
attacks upon religion which resulted in the Con- 
tinental Modernism so oppressive to the souls 
of the later popes. 

With such an example in mind it is not hard 
to see how very disastrous insistence upon a 
rigid uniformity might become. But, bad as 
that is, it can hardly be much worse than the 
intrenched deprecation of uniformity which in 



CEREMONIAL 



107 



certain Anglican circles regards almost any 
suggestion to improve upon the current state 
of ceremonial confusion as a calamity! The 
accepted Catholic type of ceremonial in An- 
glicanism is sufficiently well established and 
elastic and uniform to need no word of com- 
mendation here. But those who are unacquaint- 
ed with the necessary technicalities of this im- 
portant subject, and who nevertheless realize 
the reverential, didactic, and strategic import- 
ance of proper ceremonial, and who are unwill- 
ing for whatever reason to take up that which 
is currently accepted as the Anglican norm, 
might do much worse than to turn to the 
Dearmer directions for the fulfilling of their 
need. 



VIII 



Work Among Foreigners 

No Churchman can fail in these days to be 
enormously interested in the question of how 
the Church to which we owe our allegiance shall 
meet the problem which the great influx of for- 
eigners into the United States has brought be- 
fore us. In more than one way this is th& 
Church problem of the day. Many other ques- 
tions must be faced and are being faced with 
varying degrees of success, but this is a pecu- 
liarly insistent one. The question is no longer : 
4 4 Shall we do something for the foreigners ?" 
Eather it takes the more advanced form: "How 
shall we take care of the foreigners?" Statis- 
tics, especially in New England, show a ratio 
of increase which is startling when examined 
for the first time. New England has already 
become New Europe, and the rest of the country 
is not far behind. Indifference to the problem 
is suicidal. 

In actual personal dealing with the foreign 
element in any parish, a task which is still to 
be begun by many, and which is shrunk from 
because it appears new and strange and un- 
familiar, a great deal of unnecessary panic can 
be saved if the uncertain parson or Church 
worker will remember how rapidly foreigners' 
children become Americanized. One has only 

108 



WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 109 



to look about to see the children and grand- 
children of nncouth peasants newly landed 
twenty to thirty years ago, taking prizes in high 
school, delivering one's groceries, playing half- 
back on the local college eleven, or ringing up 
fares on the trolley. "Foreign "-named good 
Americans are thick on the country's honor rolls. 
The difficulty of approach is greatly exagger- 
ated in many minds, just as the difficulties of a 
missionary's approach to feathered savages 
which characterized one's adolescent concep- 
tion of that problem, lingers, it may be, up to 
the very point of making such an approach 
oneself — through the medium of a matter of 
fact Mission Board and under actual circum- 
stances almost humdrum. 

True, it requires of a certain kind of man a 
certain kind of courage to " go down into ' ' the 
polyglot foreign quarter of a moderate sized 
city and make converts, but the actual work 
of fitting foreigners into the mould of the 
Church usually works out as a less direct and 
less distracting task. Two points must be kept 
in mind by the priest who would do his duty by 
a community in his pastoral charge in which 
there are foreigners to reach. These two con- 
siderations tend to neutralize each other, and 
call for a sense of balance in dealing with peo- 
ple of alien traditions. First, the foreigner of 
any racial stripe possesses certain traditional 
characteristics which should be understood as 
well as possible by the person who desires to 
win him for God and the Church. Thus, Italians 
do not like men, even priests (some of them 
will lay especial emphasis on priests in this oon- 



110 THE GABDEN OF THE LOED 



nection), to call upon their womenfolk in their 
absence. Syrians expect to extend a kind of 
oriental courtesy which is more or less elaborate, 
and very apt to be almost ritualistic, and they 
expect reciprocation. The honored guest in a 
Syrian abode must play the game. Bohemians, 
especially in country places, are suspicious of 
strangers who make free with short cuts over 
the precious, fenced-in land. Bacial character- 
istics, broadly speaking, must be more or less 
understood, and the pastor who would not block 
his own way to the regard of these people as 
he goes in quest of wandering sheep for God's 
fold, must have a sympathetic understanding. 

Secondly, foreigners, so to speak, do not want 
to be treated as foreigners. Bacial peculiarities 
apart, they feel instinctively that they are at 
least beginning to be Americans when once they 
have broken the national tie and ventured out 
into the land of promise. They even frequently 
have managed to acquire exaggerated or dis- 
torted ideas of American freedom and equality, 
and they resent, sometimes almost subcon- 
sciously, being regarded as alien to the thought 
and custom of their adopted land. 

Between this Scylla and Charybdis the per- 
son who aspires to do "work among foreign- 
ers" must steer his course. The ice of first 
acquaintance being once broken, his task is 
easier, for he will, if he be interested and in- 
telligent, rapidly acquire necessary knowledge 
of national or racial characteristics by actual 
experience, and at the same time he will be 
building up his friendship with his new acquain- 
tances and convincing them, if he is wise, that 



WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 111 



he regards them precisely as he does any other 
friends or parishioners. 

The Church, when adequately presented, nat- 
urally attracts foreigners, because the prepon- 
derating majority of Christian foreigners are 
of either the Catholic or the Lutheran tradition, 
and to both these groups the Church makes 
a natural appeal. Her ordered service and 
liturgical spirit appeals to the Lutheran, while 
to the foreigner of Catholic tradition who has 
not made connection with the Roman Catholic 
parish in his new home, there is much, if not 
everything, of the very best in his own churchly 
knowledge, ready for him to enter into and 
worship with and live by. 

It would appear that some of the methods 
of approach which seem to appeal to many 
who are interested in how to meet the problem 
made by the presence of foreigners are hope-, 
lessly inadequate. Chief among these is the 
naked idea of "social service. M It is argued, 
of course, that social service work among for- 
eigners is excellent as a means of approach, a 
good strategic movement of the Church to at- 
tract those of foreign birth or the children of 
such persons, and that, having attracted them, 
the next step is to bring them into the Church 
on the basis of aroused interest in the organiza- 
tion which has been doing for them what it 
could in the way of supplying amusement and 
instruction, and with all the force of the confi- 
dence inspired in them through the interest dis- 
played in their welfare. But here again it must 
be kept in mind that foreigners not only possess 
distinctive characteristics but also that they 



112 THE GABDEN OP THE LORD 



rapidly acquire the American point of view. 
In the winter of 1914-1915 the writer attended 
a, conference of Churchmen, chiefly clergy, at 
which work among foreigners was authorita- 
tively discussed, and in particular had im- 
pressed upon him the statements of two rectors 
of parishes in large cities, each of whom had 
studied and worked over the foreign problem 
for many years. One of these clergymen has 
made a conspicuous success of his work among 
foreigners, the other has largely failed in his. 
The clergyman who has been pre-eminently suc- 
cessful approaches all his work from the Cath- 
olic point of view. His panacea in dealing with 
foreigners was revealed at the meeting. He 
said that, making reasonable allowance for 
racial characteristics, he aimed to treat all his 
foreign-born parishioners exactly as he would 
treat anyone else. The other clergyman, a 
"modernist" of pronounced tendencies, said 
that he pinned his faith to social service and 
exact study of the racial characteristics, and 
of these he enumerated a remarkably well pre- 
pared list. He paid special attention to the 
Italians among whom much of his foreign work 
was being done, and if he had considered that 
his pro and con list of Italian characteristics 
was exhaustive, he came very near the truth 
in that supposition. He analyzed the Southern 
European character in masterly fashion, but 
in spite of this he concluded his address with 
an expression of regret that after so much care- 
fully planned work, he must admit that very 
little had been accomplished. The one point 
which he left out of consideration was that the 



WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 113 



people with whom he was trying to work have 
had a continuous tradition of Catholicism for 
almost exactly nineteen hundred years. 

When the social service efforts of an organ- 
ization interested in foreigners — and especially 
in those of the Catholic tradition, as Italians — 
are understood by the beneficiaries to proceed 
from a religious society of Protestants, it is 
inevitable that their suspicions should be 
aroused; and when that organization is the 
Church, allowing the beneficiaries to suspect 
a Protestant source of activity is only the plac- 
ing of a rather unnecessary and very difficult 
stumbling block in the way of conversion, which 
is the chief, if not the sole legitimate end of the 
preliminary work of such social service. 

Here then, appears a means for dealing with 
foreigners of the quantitatively overwhelming 
Catholic tradition which in reason and becausa 
of common sense and practicality if for no 
other motives, should not be neglected. If the 
catholicity of the Church means anything, it 
means that the Church is an all-inclusive organ- 
ism. That it is not all-including can hardly 
be questioned. If the catholicity of the Church 
— as the writer has heard more than one, even 
of the clergy, assert — means that it is all-includ- 
ing, then there is not, and never has been, a 
Catholic Church. Nor indeed will there ever 
be a Catholic Church Militant until every human 
being alive on earth shall have been numbered 
among those who have accepted the faith and 
been baptized into it. That the Church, how- 
ever, is Catholic because all-inclusive is a 
position it has maintained since St. Paul settled 



114 



THE GABDEN OF THE LORD 



that question and made it clear that all persons 
without distinction of race might accept Christ 
as their Saviour and "be baptized. The Church 
is Catholic therefore on the broadest basis 
because it teaches all truth and is by its very 
nature capable of taking into itself all kinds of 
people, black, white, and yellow, red and brown, 
high and low, wheat and tares ; and its task is 
to mould these people into men and women 
acceptable in the sight of God, to feed their 
souls, and to make them capable of working out 
their destiny of ultimate union with God. 

If the Anglican Communion is nothing more 
than a rather unwieldly Protestant denomina- 
tion, it is difficult to see why it should continue 
its existence at all, because on all sides of it 
and in many dresses there are religious bodies 
very much more truly representative of the 
general principles of Protestantism. And that 
work on a Protestant basis among foreigners 
who have the Catholic tradition brings out in 
them their worst characteristics is reasonably 
obvious to all who will examine such work. 
To be more specific, the foreigner with such 
tradition in his blood and bones, who is, along 
with this good tradition, racially endow r ed with 
the instincts of Machiavelli — ready to lie, will- 
ing to acquire what he can get his hands on, 
suspicious , trained in duplicity — views that 
which names itself "Protestant" as a thing in 
which he has, naturally, neither part nor lot, 
and inevitably he simply takes what is offered 
in the way of material advantages, but normally 
goes no farther. 

Nowhere in the modern world, recent history 



WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 115 



gives clearest evidence, is there more pro- 
nounced hostility to papal absolutism than 
among the Italian people themselves. Great 
numbers of these people live at our very doors, 
to all intents and purposes unchurched. The 
wretched history of Roman tyranny in modern 
times is the life history of these Italians. All 
of them know this history because they are part 
of it. Many of them! are intelligent and even 
intellectual. They know about Minocchi, for 
example, and why he left the Church. They 
know how the modernists of the city of Rome 
felt when they turned with acclamation to their 
Jewish mayor with an address of congratula- 
ion after his anti-clerical speech of September 
20, 1910. Some of them have read the words 
of that address, where it said: "The Vatican, 
which has stifled . . * Christianity, has no 
right to speak in the name of the Church,, 
because the best part of the Church in Italy has 
no wish to co-operate in the papal program." * 
These people look upon the political papacy 
and the curial autocracy as subversive of liber- 
ty, enlightenment, and religion. But they love 
the Church. They are, above all things, Cath- 
olics; beyond all things they fear and dislike 
Protestantism. And when anyone, however 
desirous of holding out the hand of Christian 
fellowship to these childern of an ancient civili- 
zation who flock to our hills and farms and 
factory towns and great cities, goes to them in 
the name of the despised Protestant religion, 



* Quoted by Sullivan in his Letters of a Modernist, to 
His Holiness, Pius X. 



116 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



lie commits a strategic blunder the consequences 
of which are so far-reaching as to bring tears 
to the eyes of anyone who knows even a little 
of this fundamental trait of the Italian. 

The opportunity of the Anglican Church in 
America for work among foreigners is unique. 
And the factor which makes it unique is that 
we possess something which we can present 
which meets with acceptance, where tried, at 
face value, other things being equal. This 
something is a Catholic Church, Catholic funda- 
mentally, Catholic in theology, in doctrine, in 
everything in fact, except, as in many instances, 
the outward and visible signs of the catholicity 
inherent in it. It is, so to speak, "just what 
foreigners want," but they cannot, in the nature 
of things, know this unless they are shown it 
clearly, unmistakably. And they cannot be 
shown by means of social service alone, however 
well meant, nor by the outward appearance and 
terminology of Protestantism. 

It is high time that we realized two things: 
first, that most of the people we have to deal 
with as new citizens and as prospective Church- 
men — our future source of supply in many and 
widespread centers of population — are not 
seeking in the Anglican Church for an attract- 
ive Protestantism, but rather for something 
which is truly Catholic within and without ; but 
not of the papal obedience, dominated by a 
crafty hegemony and largely devoted to exploi- 
tation ; and that if such a Church as they desire 
is offered to them they will normally be eager 
to grasp what is offered. Secondly we would 
do well to realize, especially in our work among 



WORK AMONG FOREIGNERS 117 



the foreign-born and their descendants, that 
the practice of a timid moderation which has 
held us back, corporately, ought to be dropped 
once for all. This policy has kept us back from 
our normal expansion; it lays us open to the 
imputation of "Anglican pusillanimity ' ' which 
our religious neighbors are not slow to bestow; 
it has kept us from openly and honestly pro- 
claiming ourselves for what we are — not a hy- 
brid, a hodge-podge of conflicting views which 
will not even emulsify into a reasonable com- 
prehensiveness — but as what we know ourselves 
to be, God's Catholic Church for the English- 
speaking peoples. When we do that corporate- 
ly, we cannot keep ourselves from growing rap- 
idly into a position of commanding respect and 
influence, and we shall not totter along on our 
tracks. The way to accomplish this corporate 
desideratum is to assert it; and so w T e shall; 
God grant, lead these brothers from beyond the 
seas out of their muddle of papal obscurantism 
into the clear light of God's truth, the truth 
of the Catholic Church of these United States, 
the land of promise and of hope. 



IX 



The Implications of an Ancient Rhyme 

There is always a certain element of truth in 
proverbs or similar sayings because these are 
statements of crystallized opinion, and an opin- 
ion held so widely as to result in a proverb 
is extremely likely to be near the centre of 
things. Such a statement is that rather thin, 
doggerel triplet which attempts to summarize 
the characteristics of the three Anglican schools 
of churchman ship : 

"High and Crazy; 
Low and lazy; 
Broad and hazy. 9 9 

That brilliant oddity, Ronald A. Hilary Knox, 
ex-priest of the Church of England, and now 
of the papal obedience, in an article written 
for the Dublin Review shortly after his seces- 
sion, in the summer of 1918, pointed out that 
there are, actually, no less than seven varieties 
of Anglican churchman ship. As we gaze about 
us and take thought, we can hardly help finding 
that Knox erred on the side of conservatism. 
We wonder why, if he were going to apply his 
firework mind to a critical summarizing of the 
Anglican schools of thought, he should have 
stopped at expanding the traditional number 

118 



IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 119 



three into the mystical number seven. We can- 
not help thinking that such limitation is alto- 
gether too conservative; but healthful reaction 
brings us, like a bee to the landing-board, to 
the conclusion that, generally speaking there 
are three, and just three such schools, and that 
the triplet lines ending in "azy" describe them 
pretty well. Really deep thought will be likely 
to confirm this view. 

Now there are certain dangers in telling the 
naked truth, as everyone knows. And these 
dangers are not limited to the social errors 
involved, nor to the apparent absurdities which 
this unfortunate habit so frequently lands one 
in. There are the subtler dangers, such as are 
being so constantly braved by an incurable 
truth-teller like Mr. Chesterton : the danger of 
being thought a purveyor of comic articles ; the 
danger of not being taken seriously ; the danger* 
of being considered insincere ; the great danger 
of degenerating in the public mind, into a dealer 
in paradoxes, for it is not until one gets down 
to an apparent contradiction (as that great 
teacher Brooke Foss Wjestcott used to warn his 
pupils), that you can be reasonably certain of 
being on the right track. 

Even a clever essayist like Mr. Chesterton 
loses heavily because the reading public — even 
essay readers — can be quite readily shocked and 
surprised by the appearance of naked truth. 
Therefore a clumsy person must make his at- 
tempt at telling the truth with a foregone cer- 
tainty that his excursion into that fantastic 
realm where things are stated as they are, will 
be over a stony road. 



120 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



It seems to the writer that the words crazy, 
lazy, and hazy do pretty well describe the in- 
ternal situation with which we have to deal 
in that portion of the Holy Catholic Church 
legally described as the Protestant Episcopal 
Church in the United States of America. Prob- 
ably everyone who has ever heard this simple 
rhyme was at once impressed with the fact that 
it did describe the three kinds of churchman- 
ship. Probably every reader will agree with 
the writer that the author of this jingle was a 
person of insight who knew what was apt and 
what was meet. So far, good. But to look 
ahead and face the results of applying these 
tests of character, crazy, lazy, and hazy, in a 
serious and truthful way — ah! that is a horse 
of another color. 

We begin, then, with the high and crazy. 
Crazy here, obviously means not so much lop- 
sided, as in ' ' crazy quilt, 9 9 or as the word would 
be applied to a scarecrow with its inherent lack 
of symmetry, or to a very old house which has 
wilted and fallen out of plumb so as to present 
many irregular angularities, as it does dement- 
ed, possessed, queer in the head. The plain in- 
tention of the author of the line of verse is that 
High churchmen are not queer in their angles 
or physical postures, but queer in their rela- 
tion to what approximated the established order 
in the days when these lines were given to the 
world. In other words, a High churchman is a 
kind of fanatic. This is true, and may all who 
are denominated High thank Grod devoutly for 
it ! The High churchman is, plainly, a different 
kind of churchman from his lazy and hazy fel- 



IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 121 



low Anglicans. He goes at the things concerned 
in churchmanship — his worship particularly — 
in a manner which is unusual and hence comic. 
Therefore he is crazy. He does not jog along 
in the cut-and-dried, traditional Anglicanism of 
the eighteenth century ; he desires a restoration 
to the activities and practices of an era which 
was not cut-and-dried, and as this appears new 
and strange, the High churchman, who for some 
inexplicable reason likes it that way, is crazy. 
He rakes up a number of usages which it would 
be much less trouble to let alone, and when he 
has them resurrected and in working order 
they resemble somewhat, on the surface, the 
outward and visible performances of those ir- 
rational and inexplicable Romanists, and clear- 
ly he is crazy. He breaks away from the wor- 
ship of a comfortable, good-natured deity, who 
has grown rather sleepy, and who is perfectly, 
satisfied, of course, with the old cut-and-dried 
mumble of services, and the old, easy-going 
semi-disregard of himself, and the entirely cut- 
and-dried, respectable, middle-class lives of his 
mundane adherents ; all of which is a great deal 
of trouble and quite unnecessary; and so the 
High churchman is crazy. He substitutes a 
quite different Grod as the object of his worship, 
he frames his life upon the principle of union 
w T ith Him, he is abundantly careful to do Him 
honor by frequent, elaborate, and appropriate 
services, lives lived in a carefully preserved 
state of grace, costly fabrics and furniture as 
well as growing good taste in houses of wor- 
ship; he allies himself with the long-neglected 



122 THE GABDEN OF THE LOBD 



arts ; he goes to work for God — indubitably he 
is crazy as he can be. He is a fanatic. 

Now it is just this fanaticism for God, like 
that of the "High" churchman, that seems to 
be needed. The external evidence is that the 
lazy and hazy methods have failed every time 
they have been tried. As far back as history 
takes us, the cut-and-dried methods of the hide- 
bound religionist like Seeker and the fanciful 
inadequacies of the inexact or semi-believing 
religionist like Paul of Samosata have failed, 
as indeed they deserved to fail. Always it is 
the fanatic who succeeds. David, Mohammed, 
The Mahcli, Dolling, Savonarola, Wesley, Ig- 
natius Loyola, the Tai Ping group (not to mul- 
tiply instances) — all these got somewhere in 
and with their religion. As soon as the fanati- 
cism of the fervent believer — for it is a matter 
of belief — has evaporated, then haziness or lazi- 
ness sets in, and there is a let-down, succeeded 
by formalism, professionalism, decadence — fin- 
ally death, quiet, uninteresting, and unmourned. 

The lazy come next under our consideration 
for a brief examination. There is no necessity 
for a definition. Lazy is lazy. But it is pos- 
sible for a person to be lazy in part and in part 
otherwise. A man may be a lazy churchman 
and a highly successful plumber. Or he may 
be, in the case of a minister, of the type of the 
Pox-Hunting Parson lamented by the late 
James Anthony Proude. It is something like 
the latter or his more modern descendant that 
was in the mind of the author of our jingle. He 
must have meant the kind of churchman who 
cared so little for his religion that he contented 



IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 123 



himself with going through the motions, the 
minimum of motions. He had in mind the com- 
fortable, socially presentable, somewhat world- 
ly, easy-going parson; and the comfortable, 
socially presentable, somewhat worldly, easy- 
going congregation of that parson. These, he 
says, are the low. 

It is extremely difficult to understand just 
what the attraction can be in this word "low." 
It were invidious to suggest comparison of the 
connotations of this word, the opposite of 
"high," with the latter ? s glorious connotations, 
but in "low" churchrnanship there is no sug- 
gestion of an oriflamme, of a standard raised, 
no glory, no noble appeal — in short, no rom- 
ance. At best, being "low" in churchrnanship 
is a negative position, a set of opinions calling 
loudly for explanations, for an apologetic. And 
that apologetic has never been written. Save * 
for fulminations against the "high" based on 
inconclusive evidence that those so denominat- 
ed were betraying the Church over to an alien 
government, and hugely suggestive of panic, 
and a somewhat nervous sense of fellowship 
enforced with the broad and hazy, there is. no 
appreciable platform for lowness in the Angli- 
can Communion. 

Nevertheless much is to be said for low and 
lazy individuals. Their laziness is not always 
of the sitting-and-taking-it-easy kind, Prob- 
ably the laziness of the "low" today would bet- 
ter be described as an unwillingness to learn 
how to do things for God, a laziness with re- 
spect to methods. For the "low," like the 
"high," are believers. So far as their laziness 



124 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



is an intellectual quality, it consists in the com- 
placency with which they hold to the opinions 
and convictions involved in the Christian Faith, 
and their inability or unwillingness to put that 
faith into practice. There is in mind the case 
of a very prominent Low churchman who an- 
swered in the public press some years ago cer- 
tain attacks upon the Anglican Communion 
which had been given great prominence and 
which emanated from a foreign papist at large 
in this country and coruscating mightily about 
Henry VIII, Anglican Orders, and other similar 
controversial matters. The reply was crushing 
and effective. The learned papist was silenced 
and well silenced, but to accomplish this desid- 
eratum the prominent "low" churchman had to 
write from the "high" standpoint throughout 
and use "high" arguments. This he did with 
commendable thoroughness, although he had to 
leave his work on the Prayer Book Papers Com- 
mittee to do it. Then he went back to his work 
on his Prayer Book Papers, a series of publi- 
cations aimed against the 6 6 high' y in his own 
communion, and based upon a point of view 
which even the papist could not have used be- 
cause it would have been inexplicable to him 
as a man of some learning, and doubtless an 
adequate knowledge of the Christian Faith and 
what that involves. 

The "broad" and hazy have somewhat out- 
grown their haziness. They are, as it were, a 
group of persons going through a fog. They 
started from a clear bit of weather into the fog; 
and were well in when the author of the jingle 
described them. They are emerging today, but 



IMPLICATIONS OF A RHYME 125 



they are coming out on the other side of the 
bank of fog. The Broad churchman today dis- 
likes the Christian Religion, and seeks to sub- 
stitute for it something else of his own inven- 
tion. The haziness which characterizes him to- 
day is the haziness which grows out of a lack 
of partisan unity, but that haze too is clearing 
off. The "broad" is getting quite clear in his 
mind what it is that he wants to substitute for 
the Christian Religion. This is a kind of com- 
plex emulsion which is very pleasant to his 
taste. It has no very definite taste, for there 
are too many ingredients, and, being an emul- 
sion, it has to be constantly shaken, lest it re- 
solve itself into its elements again and cease to 
please. This shaking process keeps those called 
"broad" very busy indeed. The emulsion has 
many ingredients, each purporting to be " Chris- 
tian," and the "broad" wants to include the . 
"low" and leave out the "high." He is cer- 
tain that the traditional laziness of the one 
will cause it to emulsify beautifully, and equally 
positive that the craziness of the other would 
make lumps in his pleasant emulsion which he 
agitates so energetically and sniffs so agree- 
ably. 

As in the original little rhyme, it may easily 
be seen that the High and the Low are contigu- 
ous, and the Low and the Broad are contiguous. 
Laziness and haziness mingle more or less 
easily, since haziness readily absorbs laziness. 
Craziness and laziness do not mix so easily. 
In the nature of the terms, craziness must 
dominate laziness, because since anything will 
dominate that which is lazy, and as craziness is 



126 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



a very active quality, a fortiori laziness, the at- 
tribute of the "low," must yield. It is an 
axiom. The question which concerns all three 
is: Shall the lazy yield to the crazy or to the 
hazy? The latter is a process about which the 
lazy need take no thought. They can be en- 
veloped in the haze of that emulsion without 
any effort, and that way many of them are 
drifting, since, being lazy, they have little vital- 
ity by themselves. But the former would be a 
stimulating process. It is just that element of 
fanaticism which involves hard work and self- 
sacrifice which would mould the easy-going 
' 4 lows 9 9 into something with fibre, which would 
electrify a rather spineless school into some- 
thing that God could use and that God would 
want to use. And it would be too bad if the 
"lows" should be too lazy to see this before 
they are entirely absorbed into the emulsion, 
for those of them who remain with us believe 
in the Christian Religion (even though they may 
not practice it all) just as do the crazy and 
just as the hazy do not. 

In one respect, it is a very good thing for 
us Anglicans that Pius IX, of fragrant memory, 
condemned our orders so emphatically. For the 
Roman controversialist, quaerens quern devoret, 
is thus substantially estopped from using his 
best argument against us, i. e., that although 
we have all the marks of a Catholic Church, 
we vitiate our position by not putting these to 
any perceptible use, or, rather, that we have no 
inherent unity of usage and conduct. Of course, 
if we have no orders in the Catholic sense, we 
have nothing ; we do not exist as a Church, and 



IMPLICATIONS OF A EHYME 127 



the ground is cut from under the feet of the 
Roman controversialist. And this official Roman 
view, the hazy, while professing to dislike Rome 
and alleging that the crazy are Rome's Anglican 
adherents, asserts himself, specifically, when- 
ever — and it is often — he belittles the orders 
and standing of his own communion as a valid 
part of the Church Universal. In this view, 
the lazy, while he is too lazy to assert it, seem- 
ingly acquiesces, whenever — and it is almost 
always — he lists himself as indistinguishable 
from one of the Protestant Denominations save 
for our incomparable liturgy ! 

It remains for the "high"— and crazy — to 
hold up the standard of his faith; to assert, in 
spite of multiform antagonisms without and in- 
sidious treachery within, hazily originated, the 
truth of his position by his conduct. And be- 
cause he is crazy — a fanatic for God, and not - 
merely respectable and lazy, or hazily machinat- 
ing — he succeeds; he grows like a great tree, 
although he was no larger than the mustard 
seed not so very long ago. 

Is it too much to hope that overcoming his 
laziness and using the faith that is truly in 
him, the "low" may awaken out of his sleep, 
and, bestirring himself to gain that certain 
fanaticism which accomplishes God's results, 
escape the ultimate entombment of dissolution 
in a constantly agitated emulsion? 



X 



The Cheer-Up Philosophy 

The writer is not a socialist because he be- 
lieves that Christianity — which is quite another 
matter — and not socialism is the panacea for 
the sufferings of the world. But if socialism 
had done nothing else it w^ould still be worthy 
a certain respect because it has driven home the 
important truth that palliatives are useless be- 
cause they do not go to the roots, but rather 
foster and abet the evils they are meant to 
alleviate. Most of us see to-day that the effect 
of a mere palliative is somewhat akin to the 
effect of Christian Science, which may be said 
to intensify the ravages of disease by lulling 
the sufferer into the dangerous belief that as 
there is no disease there can be no suffering, 
thereby affording the disease every chance to 
increase and consume the body. 

It is an attitude like this uncompromising 
one of the socialists against all schemes which 
will not fit four-square with their own that is 
here set forth against a prevailing popular 
philosophy, a system which expresses itself in 
terms of the human disposition, a favorite sub- 
stitute of the 6 ' Modernist 99 for orthodox Chris- 
tianity which he dislikes — the philosophy of 
4 ' Cheer Up." 

This philosophy is unsound because it is en- 

128 



THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 129 



tirely subjective, ignores causes, and seeks to 
inspire an unreasonable contentment. The ut- 
terances of its propagandists are like this: 
' 6 Never mind old man, keep on smiling even 
though you are getting the worst of it. Don't 
commit the unforgiveable sin of trying to 
change your luck, simply change yourself into a 
smiler. Concentrate on your frame of mind 
and make that cheerful. Grin and bear it. 
Never repine. Smile through your tears ! Of 
course its true, as you say, that the girl who 
pretended she cared for you and played with 
your honest affection and allowed you to buy 
her a wrist w^atch, has dropped you like a hot 
cake and is going with George Brown now. But 
that's all right. Never say die. Cheer up and 
forget it! Don't get angry at her; don't let 
yourself get ruffled, old fellow. When you see 
her treat her as though nothing had happened, - 
for if you act as though you cared you'll be a 
Grouch, and the world hates a Grouch. That 
will make lines in your face. Learn to spread 
sunshine, dear boy. Look on the bright side, 
too. Just suppose you had married her. She 
might have slipped on the front steps on her 
way from her father's front hallway to the 
nuptial automobile and broken her neck, and 
then you tvould have had something to worry 
over. Don 't let the little things worry you. Re- 
member how Mrs. Wiggs found cause for com- 
fort in not having a harelip. Remember Polly- 
anna and her "glad game." Remember — 



130 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



"The year's at the spring 
And day's at the morn; 
Morning's at seven; 
The hillside's dew-pearled 
The lark's on the wing; 
The snail's on the thorn; 
God's in his heaven- 
All 's right with the world. ' ' 

"What are you in comparison with the whole 
world! Think of that lark and that snail that 
meant so much to Robert Browning, and — why, 
why— come, dear fellow, CHEER UP!" 

"Never mind if your razor handle did snap 
and now you can't strop the miserable thing 
because it wobbles sideways! Shem didn't 
bother with razors in the ark. I'd never let a 
little thing like a razor bother me." 

"What difference does it make if it did rain 
every day for thirty-eight days and now your 
old garden seeds have all rotted in the ground! 
Remember what Riley says : 

4 When God sorts out the weather and sends rain 
Wfay, rain 's my choice. ' 

"That's the way to look at it old man. 
CHEER UP! ! !" 

The main trouble with these and other simi- 
lar characteristic provocations to manslaughter 
is that there is no sympathy in them. Instead 
the person who receives the "cheer up" advice 
is, in effect, told that his grief or natural an- 
noyance is unimportant ; and, since it is to him 
immediately and touchingly important, the ad- 



THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 131 



vice, if he be a simpleton, simply stuns him, 
which does no good; or, if he possess a mind, 
strikes him as irritating impertinence. In 
either case it fails. Or, it may be, that the 
professional optimist conveys the impression 
that the fault is with the sufferer, otherwise it 
couldn't have happened. This form of consola- 
tion probably antedates the author of the Book 
of Job by some eras. Job himself recalls to 
mind an excellent example of trouble. One 
suffering from a painful boil — and none of us 
is immune — is not helped either by being told 
that there are greater things than boils — which 
only makes him think of carbuncles and writhe 
harder — or that boils do not exist. He knows 
better. He needs either sympathy or relief, that 
is, either a kind hearted friend to say "m-m-m- 
M-M-urrrrph ! 9 9 or a skilful surgeon with a 
sharp lancet. 

Professional optimists, one suspects, are in- 
sincere. It is quite possible to admire Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning's quality when she assures 
us beautifully that she lost the little cares that 
fretted her "out in the fields with Grod. M But 
it is beyond a doubt that Mrs. Browning (a 
rather sensible woman), would have had 
thoughts and a facial expression like the rest of 
us if on the way back from the fields she had 
been obliged to drive a pair of heifers a mile 
along a road flanked with much brush and many 
gateways. Or one can quite safely predicate 
the same imagined warmth of James Whiteomb 
Riley or even of that incurable optimist Josh 
Billings if one imagine either of these worthies 
dropping the soap in mid wash and having to 



132 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



fish it out, with wet and grubby hands, dusty 
and nasty from under the bathtub. 

There are worse things than "grouches" — 
insincerity for instance, or an unsympathetic 
disposition. Even the man with a chronic 
grouch deserves sympathy. In all human prob- 
ability he has got that way because someone 
has done something outrageous to him, or per- 
haps, he suffers from stomach trouble, or in- 
herited it and doesn't know it himself. If the 
promoters of the Cheer Up Philosophy really 
desire to accomplish something constructive and 
useful — they are the kindest hearted people im- 
aginable—they could take courses in Sympa- 
thetic Pedagogy and offer sympathy to the 
afflicted and wholesome chastisement to those 
addicted to wronging their friends and acquain- 
tances^ — an enormous field of effort much un- 
dermanned. 

The object of these worthy people is to pro- 
mote happiness. The large literature they have 
produced witnesses, if only by its commercial 
success, to the large room for the exercise of 
efforts in this direction. The need for some- 
thing of the kind is apparent to anyone who 
possesses five or more acquaintances. The only 
question has to do with the means. Shall it be 
the long, hard process of the Christian Life or 
shall it be the pastoral theology of the "Mod- 
ernists ' 9 which is identical with the ' 6 Cheer Up 
Philosophy"? Recourse must be had to some- 
thing. 

The kind of happiness which the "red-blood- 
ed, 9 9 hearty variety of practising i 6 Modernists 9 9 
attempt to produce within their victims is a 



THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 133 



negative thing, secured, if ever, by inducing a 
mental state which ignores actual troubles. Sin 
is not overcome by a fight, it is ignored, denied. 
Psychologically, of course, this type of happi- 
ness is only a mental attitude, a purely subjec- 
tive condition. If its end could be universally 
attained uniformity of mental state would make 
it possible to ignore circumstance and people 
would be indifferent to hunger and cold, pain 
and grief, and all the other evils which harrow 
the souls of men, because their souls would be 
asleep. Such a state of spiritual coma would 
bear the same relation to normal human happi- 
ness that the religion of Mithra bears to that 
of Christ. The apparatus would be nearly the 
same, the results might appear almost identical, 
at least externally, but one would have some- 
thing actual back of it, while the other rested 
on a product of human imagination. Christ is 
Real ; Mithra is a myth. 

Christianity teaches that true human happi- 
ness is to be found in union with God through 
Jesus Christ. This involves a lifelong struggle 
called the Christian Life, otherwise expressed 
as the soul's warfare with sin. Sin, broadly 
considered, may be defined as the centralizing 
of the universe in self and thinking, talking, 
and acting accordingly. Such an attitude is 
humanly natural, hence the specific doctrine 
called Original Sin, a perfectly clear and sound 
doctrine which has become greatly obscured by 
the concentration of men's minds upon the 
Hebrew tale of its origin by the ancestors of 
the human race in Eden which has a religious 
rather than an historical significance. 



134 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



The Christian Life possesses the tremendous 
merit of practicability to commend it to those 
whose dispositions trouble themselves and those 
about them. But the Christian Life is a difficult 
process (called theologically the salvation of the 
soul), like 'everything else "which leads to a great 
reward. The effort required to liberate a soul 
from its humanly inherited ("original"), sel- 
fishness, the turning of it Godward, and the 
keeping of it thus directed, naturally and in- 
evitably involves the sweetening of the disposi- 
tion. This is another truth which has been al- 
lowed to become obscure, and it is rarely 
thought of or is passed over by the many who 
prefer a short-cut to happiness. A person with 
a sour disposition— the kind of person at whom 
the literature and exhortations of the "Cheer 
Ups" is launched — is not living the Christian 
Life or is making a sorry failure of it. Saint- 
hood is the quality of a Christian, not respect- 
ability, not fastidiousness, not merely such 
things as commercial honesty. And the known 
saints did not and do not have grouches. People 
commonly get this fact confused with another 
and we have the phenomenon of professional 
religionists, saturated with bad theology, tell- 
ing us that Christianity needs well and happy 
people to live it and appreciate it, and the 
logically associated phenomenon of social serv- 
ice replacing the bread and meat of the gospel 
instead of occupying its true place as a product 
of the digestion of that bread and meat. 

If one approach consideration of the ' ' Cheer 
Up Philosophy" from the Christian point of 
view, it will be clear to him how far off the 



THE CHEER-UP PHILOSOPHY 135 



track are those who tell us to cheer up in order 
to be happy. They have the sequence wrong. 
The cart is set to pull the horse and the horse 
sleeps standing. For one does not cheer up 
in order to be happy. One is cheerful because 
he is happy, and the kind of happiness derived 
from cheering up is abnormal and delusive be- 
cause it is the result of habitual auto-hypnosis. 

To people in normal health on a sea voyage 
a whiff of dinner cooking in the galley puts a 
finishing touch on an appetite derived from the 
tang of salty breeze stiffly blowing. Not so the 
sufferer from seasickness. No amount of Job's 
comfort avails to raise him up, it even makes 
him worse. His state is the opposite of cheer- 
ful. 

In mental disease it is the same. Depression 
is the most typical form of mind sickness. The 
melancholic insane cannot cheer up because they 
are not happy, and they are not happy because 
their malady has destroyed or suspended their 
capacity for happiness by casting into their 
mental machinery a monkey wrench of obses- 
sion. Wise alienists charged with their cure do 
not merely attempt to cheer up their patients. 
Rather they seek to remove the wrench from 
the machinery and then to patch up the ma- 
chinery. If this can be done the capacity for 
happiness resumes its function, and the patient, 
restored to happiness, becomes cheerful. 

The same principle applies to sickness of the 
soul. A person spiritually ill, that is, suffering 
from the disease of sinfulness, has no relish for 
the simple pleasures in which those enjoying 
spiritual health find delight. He loathes inno- 



136 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



cent enjoyment, which has the same effect on 
him that seeing others playing a game has on 
the depressive insane, or the sight of people 
eating heartily upon the seasick. 

The sight of a cheerful sick man who is not 
a Christian is both remarkable and stimulating 
because it is both abnormal and attractive like 
a black eyed child with golden hair. Similar 
but more pathetic is the sight of a lunatic 
displaying a grin, which is ghastly. But the 
spectacle of one morally bad in the aspect of 
good cheer transcends the singularity of a 
pleased invalid and the horror of a maniac's 
laughter, for it forces upon the sight of the 
shuddering beholder an image of the Father of 
Lies. 



XI 



God, the Clergy, and Some Modern Writers 

Unbiased thought and examination reveal 
that God does not change and that the clergy 
are not, necessarily, queer. The clergy are 
much the same as other members of their race, 
the human. Like the Apostles, mostly rugged 
fishermen, many of them are even robust. Now- 
adays they are climbing Mount McKinley, in 
the trenches, coaching football teams or writing 
books the same as other men. There comes to 
mind that notable figure of "muscular Chris- 
tianity," Moses, the negro monk of the Thebaid 
who is alleged to have captured and bound four 
brigands who attacked him in his lonely cell, 
and, slinging them in pairs over his shoulders, 
carried them several miles across the sand to 
the nearest church where he flung them down 
before the altar as a preliminary to their con- 
version ! 

Moses of Nitria antedated Stephen Langton 
and Alcuin of York by several centuries. These 
later decadent persons performed no feats 
greater than to frame Magna Charta and regu- 
late Charlemagne. Neither would have been 
able to manage the four brigands. But anyone 
who chose to form his opinion of the clergy of 
today by reading about them in the works of 
modern writers would inevitably acquire the 

137 



138 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



idea that the degeneracy herewith indicated had 
progressed more rapidly than either the prob- 
abilities or the facts would justify. The cleric 
of modern literature is a curious personage. 
Sometimes he is a crank, sometimes merely an 
imbecile, often only wooden and inert, abnormal 
and untrue to life. He is afraid of cows. Less 
manly than the feminists themselves, he lan- 
guishes at things called pink teas, and does 
moderately well at croquet. 

The silly young parson in "Penrod" is an 
excellent example. The Eev. Mr. Kinosling is 
not only an ass, he is an impossible ass. He is 
the only abnormal character in that charming 
and popular book. One gets the same impres- 
sion from the books of Victor L. Whitechurch, 
widely read in England, and in which all the 
clergy seem gratuitously overdrawn. Out of 
several dozen clerical characters which have 
appeared in the fiction of several great weeklies 
during the past seven or eight years I recall 
only two who are natural human beings. The 
first is the hero in one of Dr. Eowland's tales 
in the Saturday Evening Post who was a clergy- 
man only in name, he having allowed himself 
to be made a deacon in the Episcopal Church 
out of gratitude to the missionary society which 
had paid for his education ! And the second is 
Margaret Deland's wholly delightful "Dr. 
Lavandar," under whose beneficent sweetness 
of character one would like to have been 
brought up, and who is as real a clergyman as 
can be found in literature. The hero in "The 
Inside of the Cup" is almost as thoroughgoing 
an ass as Hall Caine's "Christian" the Eev. 



GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 139 



John Storm, or as any of the other bewildering 
types of clerics in that tale of religious par- 
anoia. 

Isaac Sykes, the clergyman in Mr. John Gor- 
don's book, "Broken Shackles," is a person 
of another kidney altogether. Sykes is not 
precisely a comic clergyman ; but it is by virtue 
pf the literary device of the "Comic Relief" 
only that he is introduced into the book at all ; 
and his author very properly has made him a 
very Poor Stick indeed. He is the pastor of 
a church in a mill town, whose function is to 
"save the souls of the well-to-do." It is not 
even clear what "denomination" he belongs to. 
He has some small candles grouped near his 
pulpit, but subordinated to the large candle 
which stands just by it. He also has "canticles" 
in his church ; and Mr. Gordon, for what reason 
is not clear, has equipped this small-town non- , 
descript with the title of a Dean! He is the 
"Very Reverend Sykes," goodness knows why. 
This writer, probably in his desire to lampoon 
the practice, also refers to his clergyman as 
"Reverend Sykes," the enormity of which 
phraseology, w T hen used seriously — as it is every 
day, especially in newspapers— becomes fully 
apparent wiien it is compared to its exact equiv- 
alent, "Honorable McGoogin," as a definitive, 
titular description of, say, an Alderman ! 

The candles, the canticles, and the "Very" 
would seem to indicate a kind of degenerated 
Episcopalian ; although the fact that Sykes con- 
ducts his services "from the pulpit" is a dis- 
tinct per contra piece of internal evidence that 
he is one of our sectarian brethren. One "pays 



140 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



one's money" for this book — and gets an ex- 
cellent story — but is constrained to "take one's 
choice" as to the denominational affiliation of 
its clerical mud-turtle. 

This tendency to make clergymen absurd is 
comparatively recent. The clergy of earlier 
authors are not thus conspicuous, Stiggins is 
perhaps the best known of the earlier types. 
Stiggins was not a member of the Establish- 
ment, it is true, and his eccentricities are such 
as belong to his date and type, but he does not 
stand out conspicuously from the other Pick- 
wickians. Winkle is an exaggerated adolescent, 
Tupman an exaggerated old beau, Snodgrass 
an exaggerated literary bluffer, the elder Wel- 
ler a very epitome of fat coachmen. Pott and 
Shirk overdo their rhetoric, their cowardice, 
and their defiance; and Stiggins is no more 
overdrawn than they; he fits into the tale ex- 
actly. 

But Kinosling does not fit into the " Penrod" 
story exactly because he is the only exaggerat- 
ed character in the book. He is a burlesque 
parson, while the barber is an every-day bar- 
ber, and is comic just because he talks and acts 
exactly like an every-day barber. Marjorie 
Jones is a normal little girl with beaux, Mr. 
Schofield a normal businessman. The things 
done by Sam Williams, Rupe Collins, Bartet 
the dancing master, and Delia the cook are rea- 
sonable things, while Kinosling is abnormal 
and unreasonable. The things the other char- 
acters say might have been taken from dicta- 
phones ; but no mortal lips of a live parson ever 
framed the effervescent inanities which pour in 



GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 141 



one continuous stream from the mouth of Mr. 
Tarkington's clerical saphead. He is as appro- 
priate in the story as a slapstick would be in a 
delicate comedy. 

It is true that a clergyman may be odd, ped- 
antic, wicked, crazy, or comic, but so also may 
be a jockey, a grocer, a plumber, a doctor of 
medicine, or a vegetable pedlar. There is noth- 
ing in the dress, manners, conversation, or gen- 
eral appearance of the clergy as a class to mark 
them off as especially amenable to the kind of 
literary treatment they almost invariably re- 
ceive. The clergy are not addicted to practices 
which are unusual and therefore, by good psy- 
chology, ridiculous, like the wearing of mon- 
ocles. They do not habitually give utterance to 
strange cries in public as do the uncouth col- 
lectors of rags and old iron. Even the clerical 
silk hat when worn is not vivid scarlet like the ' 
hat of the rotund negro who advertises second- 
floor dentists' offices on the avenues of great 
cities. 

Most educated men, such as are capable of 
writing books, are familiar with the clergy. 
Mr. Tarkington, by his portrayal of the minor 
character Ladew in ' 6 The Conquest of Canaan" 
has demonstrated that he understands clergy- 
men; and yet Kinosling crops up in "Penrod!" 
Mr. Winston Churchill is a Churchman of prom- 
inence and yet the central character in ' 6 The 
Inside of the Cup" is unlike a real clergyman. 
After ten years' active parochial work he does 
no know how to make a parish call. Mr. White- 
church, more than any of the others, should 
know his subject, for he is an ecclesiastical 



142 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



writer. His books bear the same relation to 
the Church as those of Eden Philpotts to Dart- 
moor or W. W. Jacobs to sailormen. Yet Mr. 
Whitechurch's numerous clergymen are absurd 
images while his other characters are natural 
and sane. 

This phenomenon of undue exaggeration may 
be explicable on the ground that it lies in the 
same plane as the general impression that if a 
talking woodchuck should be discovered it would 
be in Winsted, Conn., or that every resident of 
Hackensack, N. J., habitually goes about in 
overalls and chin whiskers — except, of course, 
the women, who are equipped with sunbonnets 
and gingham aprons, and invariably carry milk 
pails. As a matter of fact Winsted is a fac- 
tory town in a prosaic, industrial district, the 
last place to look for the marvels of natural 
history so familiar to the constant readers of 
metropolitan dailies; while Hackensack is a 
suburban town almost entirely populated by 
city businessmen and their families. In other 
words the phenomenon may be due to the fact 
that a crystallized literary technique has been 
unquestionably accepted by modern writers. 

All this could have only such value as at- 
taches to it as a fact in the general field of 
literary criticism if it were not accompanied 
by a kindred technical point of view regarding 
God. The years since the opening of the twen- 
tieth century have seen produced notable work 
from a whole group of writers who are inter- 
ested in God as a subject for literary composi- 
tion, and in this time a great deal has been 
published in which God has been prominent. 



GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 143 



Algernon Blackwood, H. G. Wells, G. Lowes 
Dickinson, G. B. Shaw, Donald Hankey — it 
would be easy to make a long list — have "fea- 
tured" God in their books. So has a great 
host of poets and versifiers of every known 
school and description. The Great War, cut- 
ting abruptly into this period of renewed pro- 
duction, greatly enhanced the literary value of 
God to the writers because it turned the minds 
of the reading public away from froth to actu- 
alities. 

God, the Central Actuality of the universe, 
has been thrust upward and forward into hu- 
man consciousness, and hence into the open 
light of intellectual consideration for the whole 
educated world. Therefore we see the unpre- 
cedented phenomenon of popularity accruing to 
writers who present in verse and essay and even 
in fiction the various subjective gods of their * 
own variant intellects. God has been, as it 
were, explained; pantheistically, transcenden- 
tallv, deisticallv, and bv the various kinds of 
agnostics. Every imaginable half-formed, 
speculative, reconstructed, and impossibly idi- 
otic kind of god that the queer minds of men 
can transmute into the objective of modernistic 
appreciation through the medium of literary 
expression has been rushed into print, from the 
god of Rabindranath Tagore to the god of 
Donald Hankey. In fact it becomes more and 
more surprising the more one thinks of it, 
that a cubist has not given this weary world 
another prod by producing a purple and green 
portrait of the god of Remy de Gourmont; or 
an agile torsionist a bust of the tutelary divinity 



144 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



of Ezra Pound done in a medium of cigar ashes 
and honey. 

Mr. Wells seems to have made the deepest 
and widest impression with his god — the god of 
Britling, the Invisible King, the Animator of 
the Soul of a Bishop — that curious, limited tri- 
partite deity which Mr. Wells himself and most 
of his public believe he has discovered but who 
really is an old acquaintance to the delver into 
the lore of the Early Spring of Christianity. 

It is, however, in his chapter on "The Reli- 
gious Revival," a matter of fifteen pages in 
"Italy, France and Britain at War" that Mr. 
Wells in undertaking again the role of a reli- 
gious prognosticator has done me the favor of 
corroborating a favorite idea — the theory that 
people seem to employ two distinct intellects 
when they attempt to think. One of these is a 
workable intellect used for the everyday affairs 
of life, such as raising babies, purchasing boots, 
or constructing silo tanks. The other is a 
flabby thing devoted exclusively to the consid- 
eration of religious matters. 

In the book just referred to Mr. Wells takes 
up various aspects of the War with the master- 
ly reasoning and cultivated prophetic propensi- 
ties and acute sense of balance derived from 
many years of literary craftsmanship and 
leaves his reader stirred, or convinced, or intel- 
ligently hostile as he always does. But when 
the reader reaches the little chapter on religion 
he might suppose it had been interpolated by 
one of Mr. Wells' enemies to destroy the book 
as a work of art, just as one might, with similar 
intent, crudely introduce a putty image, moulded 



GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 145 



by a house painter, among the Elgin Marbles. 
What has happened is only that Mr. Wells has, 
for these fifteen pages, shut off the splendidly- 
running, high-powered engine of his trained in- 
tellect, and while this rests, he uses his other 
intellect, which might be described in the argot 
of the garage as a " one-lunger. ' 9 

With his god at the back of his mind, Mr. 
Wells discusses the religious aspects of the 
War. He speaks of three definite things: 1, 
The late Pope's Attitude to the War; 2, Essex 
ladies asking Co-operation of the Wells House- 
hold in Prayer; 3, An Address of the Bishop 
of London on Tower Hill in Justification of His 
Salary of Ten Thousand Pounds. The pope is 
dismissed in a very few words, which is all his 
attitude on the war seems to deserve. Then 
Mr. Wells tells his readers that he "civilly re- 
pulsed" the ladies. He wanted a satisfactory, 
ending to the War; that is why he wrote the 
book about it. He tells us in it that he believes 
in God and urges people to be loyal to God. 
But when some ladies of his home parish in 
"blue dresses and adorned with large, white 
crosses,' ' also believing in God, come to his 
house to request that prayer be made to God 
about the common desire of all concerned, Mr. 
Wells contemptuously dismisses the whole mat- 
ter as being "in the nature of a magic incanta- 
tion.' 9 Then he closes his chapter on the reli- 
gious aspects of the Great War in the belief 
that the religious activities of the Bishop of 
London are limited to the justifying of his 
stipend. It seems not to occur to Mr. Wells 
when he scarifies the "Genteel Whigs' ' for 



146 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



their apathy to Britain's cause, that he mani- 
fests an equally inexcusable apathy to Britain's 
religion. He admits being a "lapsed Anglican." 
He perpetrates the verbal distinction between 
"Anglicans" and "Catholics," a looseness of 
diction probably unparalleled elsewhere in his 
entire published works. 

The text, ' ' What are we up to ? " runs through 
all the books in the manner of "Marriage" and 
"Tono Bungay" — the phase of Wells just pre- 
ceding his trilogy of books about God. Mr. 
Wells has reasoned out and defined almost every 
human issue of modern interest except religion 
itself, and here he seems to hold with the other 
revivers of God in modern literature that the 
things of religion must and should remain in a 
kind of dim, individualistic haze. It is interest- 
ing to watch this keen thinker floundering help- 
lessly among the elementary matters of reli- 
gion, and one naturally wonders what he thinks 
he is up to. He can say: "Now sex, like diet, 
is a department of conduct and a very import- 
ant department, but it isn't religion!" (Italics 
his.) But one wonders what the content of 
religion can be to Mr. Wells when within a few 
lines of this he condemns prayer as a "magic 
incantation. 9 9 

The god of Mr. Wells appears to be the off- 
spring of compelling emotions, to be evolved 
from within, to have been thrust up through 
many strata of consciousness, like the subjec- 
tive camel of the German savant, and set down 
in travail of soul for Mr. Wells' readers to 
scrutinize. It would appear that this god is 
final, and entirely satisfactory to Mr. Wells, 



GOD, CLERGY, MODERN WRITERS 147 



and that to it must religious expression conform 
or be forever discredited. But Mr. Wells has 
not created this god. He has only refurbished 
the demiurge of the Gnostics. 



XII 



A Task for Seminabians 

Many of us, both in England and America, 
took heart from one aspect of Wartime, to wit : 
that bread and meat had replaced the dallying 
with unwholesome sweets with which we had, 
speaking religiously, become somewhat sur- 
feited. Under that desperate stress we all got 
down to bed-rock and worked on the things that 
counted in winning the war. 

Now, however, we are in the trough of a 
reaction corresponding to the extraordinary 
exertions of that desperate period, and the 
least pessimistic of us realizes that things are 
not going on as well as we had hoped they 
would. Many of us had hoped that the un- 
ornamented gospel would have received such 
emphasis for its practicability that reconstruc- 
tion, when it necessarily came, would follow the 
lines of getting down to business. 

But it has not been so, at least to the degree 
which some of us had anticipated for the re- 
newal among the English-speaking peoples. 
The same banalities are still with us, and have 
even, in many quarters, received a new lease 
of life from the policy of the American Church 
to express itself so largely in punditism, "field- 
secretaryism, ' 7 committees, minor movements, 
panaceas, muddle, and the immense amount of 

148 



A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 149 



talk which it has recently been uttering through 
the Nation-Wide Campaign as interpreted in 
many quarters. 

In England it is necessary to fight against 
conditions which allow a Welsh dissenter to 
select the Bishops of God's Church, the in- 
trenched type of fogeyism, plain dufferism, 
sinecures, barter of advowsons, unequal dis- 
tribution of funds — many matters of that kind. 
Our own problems in the Church are different 
in kind, as indeed our whole national problem 
is different, and we might sum up our diffi- 
culties in a broad, general way, as consisting 
of the ecclesiastical vice of timidity, the pas- 
sion for substitutes, and the wrong emphasis 
on what is to be taught in the Church's semin- 
aries. These tend to handicap us with the de- 
sire to compromise issues, the presence of lead- 
ers addicted to panaceas, and a body of clergy, 
less efficient than they might well be. 

Back of these and of all the wrong conditions 
in Anglicanism is a padded cross. What is 
always needed in religious revival or renewal 
is to get back to Christ, a good phrase, which 
had been popularized by the somewhat under- 
equipped theologians who wish to re-write our 
theology for us. As soon as anyone gets to 
see that it is necessary to go straight back to 
Christ, the Source of the Christian Religion and 
of life, he is, at the very outset, confronted by 
a cross. It is inescapeable. He may ignore it, 
but the price of that is to have his effort auto- 
matically and effectually vitiated. There stands 
the cross, looming blackly down through the 
Christian centuries, and God Incarnate is hang- 



150 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



ing on it, suffering; fighting a silent, bitter 
fight, against sin, the powers of darkness, and 
death. That is why there is so much of ro- 
mance in being a sacramentalist; and so little 
in being a Modernist ; why the Bishop of Zan- 
zibar, for all his sternness, is so engaging, and 
why the Bishop of Hereford, brilliant creature 
though he is, is so uninteresting; why catholic- 
ity is so greatly feared and respected by the 
world, and why the general public is so abys- 
mally indifferent to ecclesiastical ' ' attrac- 
tions." 

Very many have attempted to meet what they 
call "The Challenge of the Times" with sub- 
stitutes for the plain gospel. The efforts to 
take up the "Challenge" with Field Secre- 
taries, Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, Pan- 
Protestantism, inviting assorted sectarians to 
address the people during Lent, "Men and Re- 
ligion Forward Movements," Lifework Con- 
ferences, etc., etc., etc., will doubtless continue 
to be made by the many who do not trust the 
Christian Religion as we have it from Christ, 
and will continue to fail because fads will not 
do the work of the Christian Religion. The 
only wonder is why anyone can possibly sup- 
pose that they will ! 

The only perceptible effect of such activities 
is to make the existing confusion of thought 
and practice within the Church many times 
worse confounded. The energy which should 
and could be concentrated on the essentials is 
dissipated among a multiplicity of minor and 
unrelated activities, many of which are no more 



A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 151 



logically connected with normal Christianity 
than they are with Judaism. 

It is, of course, the gist of the gospel which 
must necessarily be presented, if there is to be 
any song at all sung to the more or less elab- 
orate accompaniment which we hear all about 
us. This gist must be animated and vivified by 
the lesson of the cross, the medicine of the 
world. Christianity's central activity is to 
conduct its age-long warfare against sin, the 
enemy of mankind. This is carried on within 
the Church both by the individual as such and 
by the pastorally-guided corporate conscious- 
ness of the people according to their units in 
parish, and diocese, and national Church; it is 
carried on by Christians duly baptized, con- 
firmed, constantly purified by penance from the 
guilt of sins, fortified by the sacraments, pay- 
ing God His worship due by participation in - 
the Great Sacrifice which is Christ's own 
service. 

It is, of course, the neglect of these central 
matters of the Christian life which makes all 
the generally-recognized trouble. It ought, for 
example, to be a commonplace that Christian- 
ity, never having been adequately tried, had 
not ceased to operate adequately as the re- 
ligion of the world. Yet there are numerous 
persons within and without the Church who 
continue to ask, "Has the Church failed?" or 
even, taking the failure for granted, put their 
query in the form, "Why has the Church 
failed?" Christianity has not failed. Chris- 
tianity has not been tried except in a very small 
way, relatively speaking. 



152 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



Here, then, is another problem for the lead- 
ers — the clergy. And why, we may pertinently 
ask, just why, does a skilled mechanic receive 
$1.20 per hour and a clergyman of the Epis- 
copal Church 35c per hour (figuring an eight- 
hour day) in return for work done and paid 
for by employers? Simply because a skilled 
mechanic's services are valued at that figure 
and a clergyman's at this. And just why so? 
Clearly, because the activities of the skilled 
mechanic are restricted to the performance of 
his proper work as such, while the clergyman 
spends his time in the performance of a variety 
pf functions many of which are only remotely 
related to his profession, and which are valued 
at a low market price because that is the wage 
of the Jack-of-all-trades. 

It is only a great river that can be both broad 
and deep at'the same time ; and it is only a very 
great man who can spread his activities over 
varied fields and at the same time sustain a 
character of really adequate ability throughout 
all or even in a few of, the essentials. As in 
other professions, the reverend clergy are all 
kinds of men, and only a few are truly great. 
It is also fact that the curriculum of the aver- 
age seminary of the Church includes so much 
that must be "covered" during the three years 
that the tendency is to turn out men half- 
taught in a large selection of subjects rather 
than well-taught in the several essentials. 

This condition if true is, at least in part, due 
to the seminarians themselves, and the worst 
result of it is that the lay people to be served 
by those clergy in future years will be apt not 



A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 



153 



to get the essentials of a normal pastorate. 
When in the course of his pastoral career the 
priest realizes, as frequently he does, that he 
cannot, as a Jack-of -all-trades, get the results 
which his early idealism demanded of him, he 
is, in turn, apt to go the wrong way about the 
remedy, and to spread himself wider and cor- 
respondingly ever thinner over his parish, 
rather than to regulate his affairs so that he 
can pick up the neglected threads and re-make 
himself along useful lines of development. This 
is because the thinner-spreading process is by 
far the easier course to pursue. It lies directly 
before him if he desire to undertake it, whereas, 
if he retrench mentally and spiritually, it means 
that he must seriously incommode himself, and 
perhaps others involved with him. For example, 
it might mean in some cases resignation of a 
cure, with all the risk involved in securing an- - 
other, under present conditions in the Church. 
It might mean cutting down on various activi- 
ties to which, by habituation, he had become 
greatly attached. It might spell serious finan- 
cial embarrassment, especially if he were 
equipped with a family of his own. He may be 
too old to study. 

But the remedy for all this lies, chiefly, in 
realizing the underlying facts while the per- 
son preparing for the sacred ministry is still 
in the course of his preparation in the sem- 
inary. To a certain extent the "tone" of any 
seminary is in the control of the student body. 
If the man who aspires to be a priest does not 
wish to come to a point in his ministry at which 
he is to realize how under-equipped he is to 



154 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



deal with certain serious problems which should 
be (and sometimes force themselves to be) cen- 
tral in his work for God among human souls, 
he must look ahead and look within, and look 
about him at what he works upon. Seminary 
students are, taken as a whole, an intensely 
attractive group of young men. Their vision is 
likely to be clear, their faculties at the keenest 
and most critical stage of formative develop- 
ment, their ideals relatively undimmed, and 
they are, corporately, beset with a high desire 
to go to work for God in His garden. Such 
men are open-minded on the whole, and it 
should not be difficult to convince them that 
they are clearly entitled to a training in the 
details and practices of the religion they are 
to teach, and in time corporately to regulate, 
after they have obtained Holy Orders. Their 
future task, speaking strategically, is to reor- 
ganize Anglicanism, and they must realize that 
this tremendous task cannot well be accom- 
plished if their equipment is to consist too 
largely of a smattering of Hebrew, a thorough- 
going knowledge of economics, a great deal of 
Church-School pedagogy, an obsession in 
favour of eschatology, or even a hard-earned 
academic skill in the rudiments of Social 
Service, supplemented by occasional visits to 
the nearby factories and state institutions. It 
cannot so be done, and as soon as the semin- 
arians realize that it must be done, it is the 
writer's belief that the Church will get action 
— quick, effective, and compelling. 

The Church seminary student is committed 
to a system which, for better or worse, hap- 



A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 155 



pens to be a sacramental system, with a not- 
to-be-ignored mystical aspect. The life of the 
ideal cleric must be both a reservoir and a 
fountain of spirituality. Every priest, ideally, 
must drink often, long, and refreshingly at the 
ever-flowing spring of Christ's life. Christ 
Himself is not so much the Giver of life in the 
religion named after Him; He is that life. To 
that life every student of Christ's is entitled to 
access. If in his seminary he is denied free 
access to that life, if his days are too much 
taken up with things academic or details in 
petto, he should, if necessary, go the length of 
demanding that access. He must have sacra- 
mental life provided for him. If, for example, 
the reverend faculty is collectively too lazy to 
take turns at celebrating so that the students 
may have the advantage of a daily Eucharist, 
the students must see to it that they have such , 
provision made for them; through the legiti- 
mate channels, of course — this is no Soviet 
counsel ! Students in seminaries must get into 
the way of leading Christ's life, otherwise they 
will never be able to induce others to lead it; 
and, if they fail to get others to lead it, their 
ministry will have been a failure from any 
legitimate standpoint. No one can give to 
others what he does not himself possess. 
Starved souls cannot be fed, even by Rural 
methods or by scientific economics, even though 
in one's ministry starved bodies may, from 
time to time, be fed through Social Service. 
But if one base his ministry upon centralizing 
Social Service, that ministry will, in the nature 
of things, even though a success on its own 



156 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 

plane, be a very slight thing when compared 
with the great and worthy body of secular 
benevolence which makes the name American 
to be blessed by the oppressed of the world. 
The great difficulty with Social Service (ex- 
cept it be carried on on a world scale as Mr. 
Herbert Hoover was able to do in his magnifi- 
cent work during and after the Great War) is 
that in any community as more and more peo- 
ple join the ranks of the workers in it, less and 
less people remain to be the objective of the 
service, and so the very success of this move- 
ment tends to destroy it as a religious expres- 
sion. An ideal of Fellowship which would, in 
its nature, include all the details of the small- 
scale Social Service as practiced by "Modern 
Churchmen' 9 would be a far higher and more 
worthy ideal, even though it need not, neces- 
sarily, be even Christian. Very splendid or- 
ganized Fellowship including all the Social 
Service details is practiced by organized Juda- 
ism, in the name and in the spirit of our com- 
mon humanity. 

1 The cure of souls involves chiefly, so far as 
preparation capable of reception in a seminary 
is concerned, great knowledge and skill in the 
Moral Theology. To this more or less exact 
science, an entire ministry in all its details 
might well be subordinated (witness Fr. Stan- 
ton's) and, by sticking to that rule, be made 
into an enormous and conspicuous success. But 
if anyone who is familiar with the management 
of the average seminary will stop for a mo- 
ment to compare the amount of time and effort 
put in upon Moral Theology with what is used 



A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 157 



up over, say, Hebrew, and then ask himself 
how much of anyone's ministry, under the most 
favorable conditions, could possibly be based 
upon a knowledge of Hebrew, the point which 
it is attempted to make will not be long in 
emerging. It is, of course, possible to get one's 
bishop under certain circumstances to dispense 
from the Study of Hebrew, but it is unneces- 
sary to get dispensed from the study of Moral 
Theology, even though a student should be ob- 
tuse enough to think M. T. unnecessary because 
the amount of time spent upon it on the aver- 
age is practically negligible in a three years' 
course. There are several of the Church's 
seminaries in which there is no attempt what- 
ever to teach this vitally important and central 
subject. 

An elderly clergyman once told the writer of 
his experience in a parish wherein he had been 
pastor for many years. It was an agricultural 
community, and in the course of the preceding 
twenty-five years the original inhabitants had 
nearly all sold their land to Bohemian farmers, 
and the parish run down in numbers until there 
was only a pitiful handful of elderly people 
left to come to Church. " Don't the Bohemians 
have children for the Sunday-school, and isn't 
there any way to get the Bohemians to Church? 
Don't they understand English, or what is it?" 
was asked. " There are three or four times as 
many children in my village," said the elderly 
priest, "as there were in the old days, for these 
Bohemians have large families. They all speak 
English, more or less, and they learn rapidly. 
When a new family comes, they usually attend 



158 THE GAEDEN OF THE LOED 



Church and bring the children, but they always 
come to me to make their confessions, and of 
course I can't hear their confessions, so they 
stop coming." 

Another central matter, is to know how to 
conduct the various services of the Church. 
This would appear to be so obvious as not to 
require discussion, but, in the average semin- 
ary, the whole subject is commonly ignored ex- 
cept in the one technical matter of the use of 
the voice. But there is infinitely more to the 
conduct of the services than the use of the voice. 
It is as though a man were in training to be 
head of a musical conservatory where part of 
his duty was to be able to lead the conservatory 
orchestra at stated and frequent intervals. If 
his training for this conspicuous duty were 
limited to a more or less exact drill in the 
manual calisthenic of baton swinging, the ab- 
surdity of the training would need no demon- 
stration from any critic. That is submitted as 
a fair comparison with the training received in 
the seminaries with respect to the conduct of 
religious services. Well may the widely-depre- 
cated Dr. Dearmer point out to the Anglican 
world that the Art of Public Worship is with 
us one of the lost arts. 

The Church is full of priests w T ho could not — 
literally could not — go into some other parish 
Church (in their own city, it may be) and con- 
duct the services there. It is full of men who 
do not know how to put on Eucharistic vest- 
ments ; how to sing any of the parts at a Choral 
Eucharist with deacon and subdeacon; who 
could not, for the life of them, conduct a choral 



A TASK FOR SEMINARIANS 159 



evensong; who do not know what to do with 
their hands even at an ordinary Low Celebra- 
tion ; who are incapable of walking in a simple 
and dignified manner in a religious procession; 
who habitually destroy the inherent solemnity 
and reverence of any service — except, perhaps, 
Social Service! One w T ould think that the 
seminary is the place where one who is to be 
charged with the conduct of necessarily litur- 
gical acts should learn these simple and funda- 
mental things. There is too much preoccupa- 
tion in the seminaries to-day with such mat- 
ters as the two dead languages, technical Sun- 
day-school methods, social reform, Boy-Scout- 
ing, and the findings of Vice Commissions — it 
w^ould appear — to leave time for such matters 
as how to take care of souls and how to con- 
duct public worship according to the standards 
which 2,000 years of liturgical development and * 
common sense have managed to formulate. 

To a very large and important extent, the 
future of the Church is in the hands of the 
seminary students, for better, for worse. Most 
of us are pretty well wearied with "states- 
manship," and fogeyism, and over-emphasis 
on side issues. Are the seminary students go- 
ing to do anything about it at the fountain- 
head, and so get the Church — which they will 
be called upon in time to share in guiding along 
the years — somewhat nearer Christ's ideals in 
their generation, or are they going to be con- 
tent with wasted time and effort about non- 
essentials and a gradually-growing, old-crusted 
Anglican dufferism? 



XIII 



Sample Christians 

The writer is acquainted with a brother 
clergyman who, in some mysterious manner, 
manages to appear always three days away 
from having been shaved, and whose hair ap- 
pears always to be three weeks away from hav- 
ing been cut. In lighter moments the solution 
of his method has sometimes afforded food for 
conjecture, and the only possible explanation 
appears to be that he tells the barber to trim 
the ends, and "shaves" himself with the kind 
of clippers barbers use on the lower part of 
one's neck! 

Practically everybody who knows this priest 
loves him because of his sweet simplicity and 
kindliness, but he embarrasses some of his ac- 
quaintances because he almost invariably hugs 
them, pats them on the back, and utters cer- 
tain vociferations indicative of joy when he 
meets them, thus causing strangers to turn 
their heads and grin. These doings are what 
people call his i i way, ' ' and it is a bad way. 

A comparison between the character and the 
"way" of this good priest is something like 
what Dr. Johnson said about Goldsmith— poor 
honest Noll, who wrote like an angel and talked 
like poor Poll ! This man is a true servant of 
God, his devotion to God and to his people are 

160 



SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 161 



things beautiful to see, but lie might greatly 
facilitate his pastoral work and increase its 
effectiveness if he could be persuaded to sub- 
stitute the ordinary manners and appearance 
of gentlefolk for the devastating details of his 
4 ' way." This priest has the traditions and the 
education of a gentleman, and along with these 
an ample income, and yet he is the kind of man 
who wears a collar several times, who per- 
forms his ablutions sketchily, and who leaps 
out of bed ten minutes before the hour set for 
his first service and huddles on his clothes, 
which have hung over a chair-back during the 
night. 

There is another priest in mind who is very 
neat, spick and span. He radiates cleanliness. 
He is always up on time, and shaved, brushed, 
and pressed to a nicety. His household falls 
just short of being painfully neat and orderly. 
There is a place for everything, and adequate 
equipment and system throughout. The parish 
church over which this sartorial paragon pre- 
sides reflects his spirit. It is a model of cor- 
rectitude and should be a joy to every wor- 
shiper. This priest, too, is a godly and pious 
man who loves God and serves his people well, 
feeling keenly his pastoral responsibility and 
making the acquisition of skill in his proper 
work a matter of constant study and watchful- 
ness. He wastes, however, one fears, a goodly 
portion of his pastoral influence because, to put 
it in an old-fashioned phrase, he always has a 
chip on his shoulder. 

He is perfectly fearless, entirely unhampered 
by the corporate timidity which blasts Anglican 



162 THE GARDEN OF THE LOED 



growth so disastrously, and always ready for 
an argument. He fairly bristles at times. He 
has a formula for everything and into his mould 
everything must fit exactly or someone risk a 
belaboring. He vigorously resents it if even a 
kindly old lady of the Methodist persuasion, 
who means to be courteous and even motherly, 
addresses him otherwise than as "Father." He 
appears incapable of referring to the Euchar- 
istic Sacrifice by any other term than "Mass." 
He is what Mrs. Mandell Creighton described 
as a Katholic! Churchmanship is constantly 
on his mind. He is constantly bracing up his 
catholicity and that of the Church by flying 
buttresses of diction, and so defeating his own 
purpose by thus suggesting that it is rather 
frail and crumbly. There is a suggestion of 
pertness about this really worthy priest and 
gentleman quite out of relation to such matters 
as incense and meditation and the cool grandeur 
of noble gothic fabrics. 

Then there is the writer's old friend, the 
great rector, who has accomplished many won- 
derful works and brought many souls to know 
and love their Lord. The great rector is a 
driving mass of energetic force, always battling 
and striving against the powers of evil and 
making a noble and a winning fight of it. In 
his community he is a power, in the pulpit he 
is mighty, in pastoral visitation indefatigable 
— but, he is a great trial to his organist because 
he changes his mind and the hymns at the last 
instant. His curates are kept jumping about 
from place to place and from task to task with- 
out any regard, it w^ould seem, to the fact that 



SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 163 



they are human beings. He gives them con- 
flicting and contradictory commands, forgetting 
when he tells Brown to drop what he is doing 
and rush to get something else done, that Rob- 
inson did it a week ago. 

It is a puzzle to the great rector's friends 
how his magnificent wife manages to stand up 
under the vast load she is obliged to carry. It 
would be a greater puzzle if they realized how 
heavily the great rector leans upon his wife, 
and how she sacrifices her own convenience and 
comfort for him. It never seems to occur to the 
great rector how extremely selfish he can be, 
and how, in getting done his share of the Lord's 
gardening, he gets in the way of all who are 
associated with him in kindred tasks. All these 
subordinates refrain from complaint, that is, 
all but the sexton, w T ho differs from the rest in 
that he does not pray for strength to endure, * 
because he is a person of adamantine taciturn- 
ity, even in his relations with God. 

Clergy like these, other kinds, and "church 
workers ' ' in general, are all sample Christians. 
It is chiefly by contact with them that the peo- 
ple of any community test the quality of the 
religion which has produced the outward and 
visible sample. To the people the clergy and 
church workers are the living, examinable 
product of the gospel they represent and by 
which they live; and the people's attitude to 
that religion is apt to be governed accordingly. 
This principle can be illustrated in many ways. 
For example, if a music teacher cannot perform 
acceptably upon the instrument she teaches few 
people will care to employ her to teach their 



164 



THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



children to play that instrument. If a tailor 
wears ugly, ill-fitting clothes, it requires a kind 
of rare, mystical faith on the part of the cus- 
tomer to entrust him with the making of 
clothes. So it is in the case of a prominent 
Christian — a sample Christian. People may 
love the unshaven, slack-dressed priest, but he 
cannot impress them as a very wholesome prod- 
uct of his own system. They may admire the 
priest with the chip on his well-brushed shoul- 
der, but they can hardly avoid drawing the con- 
clusion from contact with him that his religion 
must be an over-rigid system. Many may 
revere the great rector and even look up to him 
as pagans to their demigods; yet when they 
notice that they are hugging themselves in a 
spasm of self-congratulation because they do 
not have to work for him, or be his wife, they 
may possibly go a step farther in analysis and 
begin to deprecate the Christianity which can 
produce such a demeanor in so very prominent 
a professor of it. 

There is this much good, in what has been 
called "The New Morality," that it defines as 
sinful that which works harm to one's fellow 
man. The only objection to this system is that 
it stops short of defining as sin that which 
hurts God. Perhaps to the New Moralist God 
is too transcendent to be hurt. But dirtiness, 
and truculence, and tyrannous behaviour not 
only hurt those who have succumbed to these 
evils, and do not only distress those surround- 
ing such persons — they also, surely, hurt God; 
because, man being in God's image, they mis- 
represent Him whenever they appear in con- 



SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 165 



nection with those who represent God to their 
fellow men. If such persons are not, as it were, 
samples of God Himself, they are at least 
samples of what God can produce in persons 
and lives; and any who, like Christ Himself, 
would attempt to represent God to man, must 
be at his best and as much like God as possible, 
clean and unselfish, gentle and kindly. 

These rough categories do not, of course, 
exhaust the list of blemishes which all who try 
to interpret God would do well to avoid. Per- 
haps the most prominent of the many others 
which might be listed as weeds in God's gar- 
den are the devastating vices of timidity and 
ignorance. These misrepresent God very dread- 
fully. For God is not only omniscient; God is 
also so divinely brave that He dared to make 
men and endow them with free will. And by 
the terms timidity and ignorance it should be- 
carefully observed that humility and mere lack 
of education are not intended. There is room 
for a certain confusion here. Many a person 
who is simply timid thinks he is endowed with 
a blessed humility. Man} 7 a one is learned and 
even scholarly, and at the same time wofully 
ignorant of what is going on in the garden of 
the Lord. Many of us will question the quality 
of a piece of cloth while swallowing untested 
the statement that God did command the in- 
vaders of Canaan to put to the sword all liv- 
ing creatures in Jericho, and find no trace of 
difficulty in the matter, even though within ten 
minutes they may hear it said that God so loved 
the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son. 
This is ignorance ; the kind which crumbles be- 



166 THE GARDEN OF THE LORD 



fore the crudest of criticism and takes refuge 
in the formula that with God all things are 
possible ! 

This kind of ignoramus may have at his fing- 
er's ends an encyclopaedic knowledge of Greek 
prepositions, and the characteristics of all the 
early heresies, yet remain unaware that his 
own son has abandoned his belief in God ! There 
are not a few accredited leaders who (like the 
people in Tudor Jenks' fable, " The Statue") 
are so taken up with admiration of the statue 
which stands in the great square of their city 
that they would fail to recognize the subject of 
the statue if he should walk among them in the 
flesh. There are prominent churchmen who do 
not realize that the Church of God must move 
forward all along the battle-line, acquire new 
glories and beauties and revive old ones! 
Such are satisfied, in one field of endeavor, to 
give old clothes to a man out of work ; while in 
another they are apt to believe that churchly 
ceremonial attains its consummation of excel- 
lence in the parade of the vestry with the alms 
during sung mattins on a Sunday morning. 
They are delighted with their accomplishment 
when the pupils of the Church School have 
learned to enumerate the list of the kings of 
Israel and the places visited by St. Paul on his 
second missionary journey, as though these 
matters were the gist of the Christian Religion. 
They would be glad, of course, to "minister to 
the Italians, ' ' but there are so many things in 
the way! The present congregation probably 
wouldn't like to have the church invaded; and 
then — the germs! The children couldn't be ex- 



SAMPLE CHRISTIANS 167 



pected to come to the Church School if there 
were Italians there, naturally. "Altar lights? 
Candles? Yes, oh, yes, entirely fitting and very 
dignified; but then there is Miss W. — her uncle, 
— a very saintly character — was a vestryman 
here for forty-three years, and it is quite cer- 
tain that she wouldn't like it; she would un- 
doubtedly be offended! — well, disturbed, then, 
and that would never do!" 
v Of course, the minds of these timid folk are 
simply closed to the needs of the ninety-and- 
mne just persons who are alive in their com- 
munity, but who have not been attraced by the 
Church as they might be if the Church, as 
locally represented, did not continue to hold in 
solution, and hence latent, a great part of what 
the Church should be teaching and doing. Ig- 
norance and timidity do not make any great 
appeal to people who are alive. One can be * 
"other-worldly" and yet take an intelligent 
interest in aerial freight transportation. One 
jnay be self -immolating to the last degree, yet 
Insist upon truthfulness and reverence and 
order. Even in a petrified community there is 
no singular merit in being conservative for the 
sake of being conservative. It is the man, and 
especially the pastor, the spiritual leader and 
guide, who respects his responsibilities and his 
community enough to turn the community in- 
side out if necessary, who is truly worthy the 
regard of the community, and who wins that 
regard because he earns it. One whose lot may 
be cast and whose life must be led as leader 
and guide among the backward and the timid 
and the ignorant must, more than any other, 



168 THE GAEDEN OF THE LORD 



demonstrate what Christianity has done for 
him to make him courageous and wise and clean 
and gentle and strong and unselfish. His Gos- 
pel must stand out like a tower placed on a 
hill. 

It is, especially in the ministerial priesthood, 
leadership that God's people are hungering for 
— not mere acquiescence in the foibles of the 
spiritually narrow-minded. It is not the gard- 
ener who saunters about, nodding to the pop- 
pies as they swing in the breeze, who makes his 
garden grow. 

If the priest rise to the opportunity w T hich 
God has given him, the garden which is his in 
trust to cultivate must blossom and bear fruit. 
He must implant in the soil of the heart among 
his people the seed of a glorious vision to which 
they will be moved to reach up, even though it 
transcends their comprehension when it bursts 
into bloom ; but at the very least they will learn 
to look up and not be afraid. 



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